Read Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) for Free Online Page B

standardized testing. “We do not,” he had insisted, “teach standardized students.” So he had protected teachers from the need to give continual “practice” tests.
    One bad thing: as a result, Bay St. Lucy’s test scores were usually among the lowest in the state.
    One other bad thing: April van Osdale was coming to town to change all that.
    Well. Worry about one thing at time.
    For example, the budget.
    Budgetary matters were now handled by computer, of course, there being one website for this document and another for that document. It was and had always been stunning to her that in every educational establishment in the country (and probably the world) there was never enough money to get things done and always too much money to keep up with properly.
    So that finances and the proper dealing with them were going to take up, she knew, a majority of her time, making her yearn for the chance simply to pop into one of the classrooms opening onto the central hall and teach, if only for a moment, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets or Jane Austen’s novels.
    That, of course, remained the province of Macy and her fellow English teachers.
    There was to be one more English teacher in Bay St. Lucy High School. Word had filtered down the prior week that Macy’s replacement (at least for the remainder of the school year) had been personally hired by Jackson Bennett, head of the school board––and would begin the following day, on Tuesday.
    Max Lirpa.
    No one seemed to know much about Max Lirpa, but if he’d seemed impressive to Jackson, then he was surely suitable.
    Except that he was a man.
    Nina made a mental note to herself: She would have to remember to warn Ms. Eunice Duncan, now head of the department, not to start each weekly meeting of the English teachers with the greeting: “Good afternoon, Ladies!”
    All of these things, then, were different.
    But the main things, the basics, never changed.
    Despite everything, it was just as she remembered it.
    There remained, and always would remain, the golden, eternal rule of being a principal: that being, ‘there is no golden rule.’
    There is no book.
    There is no syllabus.
    There is simply arriving every day at precisely seven o’clock, realizing that whatever was to come in the next ten or twelve or fourteen or sixteen or whatever hours would be completely unexpected, and arrive neatly packaged on her desk in shining gold paper, labeled with the word “Crisis.”
    And realizing also that there was an invisible sign outside her door from the time she walked into the building every morning, this sign reading:
    I’M HERE. BRING IT ON.
    And, of course, people did.
    Monday morning, first official day back for Nina Bannister, 7:50 AM.
    Her office door opened, and Thelma Blankenship, her administrative assistant, said:
    “A school bus, Nina, has just slid off the road.”
    “Oh, my God. Where?”
    “Somewhere between Lee’s Landing and Portageville (these being villages adjacent to Bay St. Lucy, but in the St. Lucy School District).”
    “Anybody hurt?”
    “Apparently not. But they’re just stuck out there.”
    The phone rang; Nina answered it.
    “Yes? Yes, I’ve just been told about it. I’m taking care of it now. No. No, there’s no injury. No, I’m not sure how it happened. No. No, it’s certain that he wasn’t drinking. No. No, I just know. That’s Cal Taylor’s bus. He’s one of our best and most veteran drivers. Yes. Yes. No. No Yes No. I’m trying to get him on the phone now. No. No, we’re sending an auxiliary bus out to pick them up. No No. Yes, definitely. Not at all. No there’s no chance of that. Drugs were definitely not involved. I know it’s cold, but the bus is heated. No. No, Cal knows to guard against carbon monoxide poisoning. He’ll keep the heater on, but the children won’t be asphyxiated. I’m sure of it. No, I did read something about that, and, yes, they did freeze to death, but that was in northern Alaska. No. No,