Bus Pass

At a recent gathering of some of our old school friends, I was reminded of a story relating to my middle school years. I was (somehow) put into a magnet program where all the kids were bused from all over town to a school in the middle of Tucson. The program was called GATE (an acronym for Gifted And Talented Education).

GATE ran from first grade through eighth, then the best of the best could apply to go to University High, the high school extension of the program. You had to test into GATE and work hard to stay there. As the years go by, the window to get in and stay in gets smaller and smaller. As you can imagine, there were some pretty exceptional people in this group of kids.

One works at NASA. One went to Harvard and later became a Senior Advisor to India under the Clinton administration. One of them is one of the top video game producers in his industry, including leading the development of Call of Duty (I’m not a gamer but I think that one is a pretty big franchise). There weren’t many dummies in the cohort I was in, that is for sure.

There is an old saying in poker. If you look around the table and can’t figure out who the sucker at the table is, that person is you. GATE is somewhat like that. If you looked around the room and saw all geniuses, the bottom of the educational totem pole was probably you. My time in GATE came to an end between 7^th and 8^th grade, smack in the middle of my junior high years. Which leads us to this week’s Huddle Up theme…..

As many of you know, I was a basketball player growing up. Not a great one by any means. I turned out to be a better coach than a player. The group of guys that I played with in elementary school and into junior high were awesome. So getting knocked out of the GATE program would mean that I’d have to play with my neighborhood school and not across town with my mates. My parents had both worked for this particular school district in the past and knew that we could appeal to finish out my 8^th grade year at the magnet school as a “regular” student.

When my mom went to make our case to the school board, they said I had to go to my local school. Those were the rules. As my mother fought back, and fought back, and fought back, they kept saying “no.” When she asked what the big deal was and why I couldn’t finish junior high with the kids I’d been with for seven years, the school board gave the real answer…..

“We can’t pay for his bus pass.”

Really? The bus pass was the most important thing in this instance and not the kid? The bus passes in question here were something like $11 a month back then. Hardly worth trading a budget line item that small in for a kid’s chance to finish out with his crew.

My mom said we would pay for the bus pass, filled out whatever forms needed to be filed, and I got to play one last year with my guys in 8^th grade. We did pretty well that year, fell a little short of our end goal, but it was all worth the fight. So this week’s question is this…..

How many times are we sticking to the rules over a “bus pass” issue instead of figuring out ways to do the right thing?

There are way more ways to use our creative intelligence and find win-win scenarios than just stating the “way we have always done things” like they are bible and verse.

When conflict arises this week, look for common ground and find a way where everyone comes out better on the other side.