average daily attendance (ADA)

Revenue limit districts are funded through student attendance. Most school districts are funded this way. Any time a student is absent the school loses money. About 80% of a district money comes from this source. The rest comes from the federal government and independent sources. Each student is effectively worth about $4800 a year, which comes to about $26 - $27 per day.
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AP

Advanced Placement (AP) - high school students can receive college credit for taking this class and passing an exam. The problem is many students take these classes just so they can have the AP designation on their transcript, and many "high end" schools no longer allow students to test out of classes, but rather have started using the "AP" label as an entrance "requirement." These classes are significantly more difficult than any corresponding course at any college.
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Kurt

(names ARE changed)
As of 2004-2005, a Sophomore. I'm defining him because I have a distinct feeling over the course of the next three years he'll appear again.
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No Child Left Behind

Another governmental program to get schools to shape up. This one is supposedly the Republican version, but it's just as stupid as every other version ever thought up by any government anywhere, liberal or conservative. It involves standardized testing, which is crap. Non-educators think that the product that comes out of a school should be uniform, much like a business. A Ford plant in Michigan produces a Mustang convertible. A Ford plant in Tennessee should be able to produce the exact same car...and because the materials and procedures are the same, generally, they do. What standardized testing assumes is that every kid is the same. The equivalent to what they're asking for is the Ford plant in Michigan to get metal, rubber, and plastic, and produce a Mustang, while the plant in Tennessee gets wood, paper, and felt strips and is expected to produce the same car.

It's not going to happen. When is anyone who doesn't teach and legislates laws going to understand that?
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Physical Education

PE
Physical Education is required for most schools at the Freshman and Sophomore levels. It's basically "show up and participate and receive an 'A'." Oddly enough, there are plenty of kids who can't pass this class. Stereotypically it is the course that most people think coaches teach.
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baseball coach

Vinnie has been the baseball coach forever at the school. The man knows more about baseball than one could ever imagine. Outside of baseball however, he is a hard nosed, stubborn, good guy who is easy enough to get along with if you agree with him. Luckily, agreeing with him doesn't require a huge commitment. If it did, there would be some obvious problems...
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basic aid district

Basic aid districts, unlike revenue limit districts, actually fund their schools through their tax base. Most districts are not this type of district, but the districts that are funded in this manner tend to be more high-income. Since they are not funded through attendance, these schools do not care if students show up for class or not.
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coachie

formal: COACH
A term used by coaches and athletic directors that applies universally to everyone. I have seen it used by some of the older coaches to reference principals, who have obviously never coached anything. For athletic directors and such, it is an easy way to remember the names of everyone at the meeting...people you only see three times a year and probably don't spend a lot of time with.
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counselor

I have a negative take on most counselors. They tend to be some of the nicest people in the world, and as a result, tend to be extremly enabling with kids that don't deserve it. That being said, it is a comletely worthless job at a high school. Primarily their job is to set schedules for students. They work extremely hard at the very beginning of the year and pretty hard at the beginning of the second semester. Were they to do their job properly in the first place their workload at these times would diminish considerably. Aside from that I really don't know what they do. I understand some social counseling goes on and some college application stuff, but I've seen counselors screw up on telling a student what they needed to take and as a result to graduate on time the student had to go to night school. Maybe it's counselors at my particular school, but I doubt it, I've thought they were worthless since I was in junior high.
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expel

expelled, expelling, expulsion
Just your standard, run of the mill defition would not do for this one. Everyone knows what it means, but in education I don't think people have a clear understanding of it. A student cannot be expelled (kicked out of school for the rest of the year...generally) unless they seriously screw up. Because education is a RIGHT, if expelled, it is the school's responsibility to find ANOTHER school for the student to go to, that way the shitty kid can poison another system. In a district where there is more than one high school, the student could literally get expelled from every school in the district. In a small district (such as mine), finding another school for the student to go to is very difficult. Expelling kids doesn't happen a lot, and generally only when there are criminal implications as well.
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freshman

9th grader. Generally starts the year at 14, turns 15 during the year. Ages vary (sometimes students start early or later), but this is pretty standard.
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in school suspension

Also known as an in house suspension, basically a kid does not attend class because they go to the library and sit in there all day. The reason for this is they did something to keep them from class, but not so bad as to actually suspend the kid. Here's the odd thing about this (and you'll learn that education rarely makes sense). The kid generally will get an in school suspension for a lot of unexcused absences. So they're already behind. The in school suspension allows the kid to miss another day of school...so basically his punishment for cutting is to miss class.
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junior

11th grader. Generally starts the year at 16, turns 17 during the year. Ages vary (sometimes students start early or later), but this is pretty standard.
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little Jonny

Little Jonny is a fictitious character. His name has not been changed because I made him up. I have few other fictitiuos characters I'll bring up now and again, but little Jonny is the first to appear...usually if there's a "little" prior to the name, the kid is fictitious and I'm referring to them as I hypothetically speak to a parent. That being said, I'll try to remember this and if I do use "little Jonny" while referencing an acutal kid, I'll try to remember this to prevent confusion.
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rainmanesque

From the movie, "The Rain Man" (Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman) -- Tom's first movie that wasn't specifically about him being a pretty boy/metro-sexual (gay) and actually required him to act. It's the ability to remember the most incredibly inane things from God only knows when, sometime in the past, whether last week or 20 years ago it does not matter.
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revenue limit district

Revenue limit districts are funded through student attendance using ADA. Most of their money comes from this source, so student attendance is extremely important. Attach a few other factors. The amount comes to about $4800 per student. If the normal tax base of the district does not allow for $4800 per student, the state takes revenue from local businesses, generally the public utilities, until $4800 is reached. Fully understanding how schools are funded can be found in books, and would require more than a simple paragraph (and it wouldn’t be written by me, because I don’t fully understand the process). It’s one of the, “the more you know the more you realize you don’t know anything” issues. The way schools are funded needs to be completely re-evaluated.
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Senior

12th grader. Generally starts the year at 17, turns 18 during the year. Ages vary (sometimes students start early or later), but this is pretty standard. Senior year is an interesting time for many. Some students view it as the last time they will ever go to school. Some become legal adults, most will graduate. Some will fall apart their last two months and teachers of Seniors will have to try to explain this to overbearing parents who never said anything all year. Personally, I love the Seniors, and view my job as more than just whats in the book, but my last chance to get them to view the world in a common sense way. Figure out what's important, what's not (it's different for everyone)...but that's stuff for the soapbox.
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Sophomore

10th grader. Generally starts the year at 15, turns 16 during the year. Ages vary (sometimes students start early or later), but this is pretty standard.
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suspend

(suspension, suspended, etc.)
When a kid does something bad (gets caught smoking pot on campus or something) that is not bad enough to be expelled for, they are generally suspended. Basically they go home and don't come back to school for a number of days. By law, when a kid is suspended they are allowed to make up any work missed, so this turns out to be a mini vacation for some of them. The real problem with a suspended kid is because of the nature of the type of kid that gets suspended, they are probably behind in class already. Then they miss a week of school and get further behind. They come back and don't make up anything they missed, and are now even further behind than they were before. It may be frustrating, and leads to them getting suspended again. This is similar to, but not the same as an in school suspension.
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unexcused absence

Also known as a cut, an unexcused absence is basically a kid not showing up for class for no reason. They simply didn't show up. If a kid is sick and a parent forgets to call in and excuse it, eventually it will be an unexcused absence. After a period of time (about two weeks), it cannot be changed. The problem is our vice-principals are more than two weeks behind in telling kids that they were absent, and as a result of this some kids don't know that when they will ill their parent forgot to call it in, and as such they find out they have an unexcused absence and there is nothing they can do about it. One cannot make up work if they are unexcused.
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union

A group of people that do basically the same thing and unite for a common purpose, such as wages or benefits, against the management. Pretty much the standard, run of the mill definition, I have issues with the union, but I also agree that it's existence is a good thing. In this particular case, TEACHER'S UNION...it's hard to say where I stand. On a political level I pretty much disagree with most everything the union does. I'm also torn with respect to the union I'm in because it doesn't really support the high school that much. In addition, I've seen people get fired without cause after three years of work with decent evaluations...my understanding is the union is supposed to prevent these sorts of things, not sit idly by and say, "it's in the contract." Maybe I'm just an idiot.
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