I am PENDING!

It's actually a good thing. I can't remember if I mentioned this here, but the state of Minnesota had a partial government shut down from the beginning of July to yesterday due to budget disputes and such. This put all non-essential employees and tasks on hold until they could agree, though I read many articles that indicated some fairly essential activities had halted (testing for West Nile, bridges, etc.). This included a great deal of the Department of Education. And licensing.

This also brings me to discuss how frustrating the University of Minnesota's SPS can actually be. (SPS=Student and Professional Services) Many of the people that have worked there have been nothing but rude, and, after a discussion with Terry and Regan, I would say that they have hindered many steps in our process rather than helped them. (Not to say that all of the people that work there are bad--there have been several people that have been very helpful to us, and in light of the way we get treated in this program sometimes, it makes you really want to hug them!) Anyway, in this particular instance, one person (who I will leave nameless, though everyone in the program will know) was collecting the applications for licenses, where we jumped through hoops, giving fingerprints to just the right person at just the right time and had to keep ahold of them for six months without losing them somehow, giving a check to one place and a money order to another, making sure all of our five Praxis scores arrived at the right place (mine didn't, so I had to bring them in to be photocopied) and we were cleared and then we had to do a little jig while singing songs from Conjunction Junction. Anyway, the woman, with her stack, said it would take about a week to ten days to get it sent out to the state, and they generally took about seven more days to post us as pending. Well, this particular woman took a month. She sent it on July 5th. Fury, maybe? I even paid the extra $5 to have my transcript rushed to her so that my license could get to Lakeville faster. I am NOT HAPPY.

Of course, it's all better there, but the purpose of this place is the help us. I think it would have been easier if I took care of everything myself, once I was cleared, which was before this woman even touched my things. I guess someone else called the woman to ask what was going on, and she said, "These files have been sitting on my desk for a week. There's so many of them; I just don't know what to do." I'm sure it didn't quite go like that, but these people have had a say in designing of the program--they should know most of us will apply as we are ending student teaching and are finally cleared.

Anyway, the very, very good news of this morning is that I am pending as of 7/8 (they date-stamped everything during the shut down--one person in the whole processing that would date stamp everything they received, so that is probably when they received it). I even have a file number now.

I think it's kind of neat to look up other people, such as my cooperating teacher or my principal.