Here's how. Take a deep breath at 3 p.m., leave the building, get in your car, go spend a couple of hours with your OWN kids and have fun for a week. After spending four years in a district with a great funding base, coming in at 6:30 for school that starts at 7:30; doing art club without compensation and paying for my own child's afterschool at the same time, I got fed up. It didn't help that the district has been funding all the sports activities and was considering bowling (!) as a stipend when they refused to consider putting art club on the table. Nor did it help when the PTO told me that no, they didn't fund stipends and I found out over the summer that surprise! they did for two other teachers. My parent base is large, but sometimes, you just get taken for granted. I cut out the childcare routine this year, took my own deep cleansing breath and have been surprised at how I still manage to get the extras in by continuing to come in one hour "extra" a day. Next year that gets knocked down to 30 minutes. While reading Art and Fear this summer I realized that if I wasn't worth time, how could I be an effective advocate for others? Good luck! At 09:36 PM 9/2/02 -0500, you wrote: Maggie Tucker mtucker@nashville.com ---