are we there yet?

Today I find myself riding along with 20 of Cristo Rey Jesuits finest as we transport them by big yellow school bus to their work placements. As I sit for a total of two hours bumping around and weaving through the streets of downtown Houston I am surprised that the 14 and 15 year old students still feel the need to ask the nagging car trip question "Are we there yet."  Inevitably we are not... such is the day in life of me. Please note I would love additional witty responses beyond my current "what do you think" "yes we are" (when we clearly are no where near their destination)...

with that I realize I may have never explained my school slash placement...

I work at Cristo Rey Jesuit of Houston which is part of the whole Cristo Rey Network.  We are the youngest/ most recent school and are only in our second year. Thus we only have freshman and sophomores.

Our students come from various backgrounds which inhibit them to afford private/catholic high school but the Cristo Rey model solves this with a unique approach of integrating class room learning and real life job experience.  Thus the students attend school 4 days a week and work 1 day a week.  Each job or sponsor holds one full time job for our students and each day a new student comes into work.  Thus there is a Monday work crew, Tuesday work crew etc... (the students rotate who works on Friday and thus one week a month the students work two days).

I work in the office that coordinates the job placements/ transporation/ billing etc. Our office is basically its own temp agency for our students who do basic jobs at white collar placements such as filing, coping, faxing and answering the phones etc.

As this was our first week of actual classes and work our office has spent its time fine tuning our transportation (hence me riding to the bus to both supervise and time how long it takes us to get from job to job). 

It really is a pretty exciting (and busy) place. But a lot of cool things happen here and it's awesome to hear about the work lives of our students.

Working in a high school isn't too bad either! It brings me back to my good old days at DSHA. The dicotomy of my days is quite funny to me, I spent part of my day in contact with one of our sponsors in the Energy Sector smoothing out a new student who will be working there (ah the corporate world) and later I gave my first "pep" talk to a student who was frustrated about his soccer practice. Board room to soccer field this place is quite interesting.