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Timing of N.J. teachers convention a boon for baseball fans
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As a Phillies fan, Kenneth Ye has had a hard time going to sleep for the past week before his team's World Series games have ended.
So he hasn't.
The 11-year-old says he has been staying up to watch the end of all the Phils' night games with the New York Yankees. And he swears he hasn't had any trouble getting up the next morning for his sixth-grade classes at Egg Harbor Township's Fernwood Avenue Middle School - even if the average game in the series has finished near 11:45 p.m.
Still, it was great news when Ye and his friends realized they do not have to be up for school Thursday after tonight's World Series game. And if the Phillies manage to win and force a seventh game Thursday night, Ye and his buddies - and public school students all across New Jersey, and their teachers - will be able to sleep in Friday because they don't have school that day, either.
That's because many of the state's 113,000 public school teachers are going to Atlantic City for the New Jersey Education Association convention, an event that closes schools every year for the vast majority of the 1.37 million or so students who go to about 2,500 public schools in the state.
Yes, this would be the state that's stuck smack in the middle between Philadelphia and New York City - and that's roughly divided geographically on sports lines between fans of New York teams, including the Yankees, in the north, and fans of the Phillies and other Philadelphia teams here in the southern part of the state.
But that dream convergence of the teacher's convention and baseball's biggest event wasn't dreamed up by baseball-mad members of the NJEA, a union official promised Tuesday.
"We didn't schedule around the World Series," said Steve Baker, an NJEA spokesman.
The NJEA has followed its convention schedule - meeting in November, the Thursday and Friday after Election Day - for "decades," Baker added. "It's been for years. ... It goes way back."
And for the record, this is just the third time that the World Series has ever stretched into November. If there is a seventh game Thursday, 2009 will also become the latest-ending World Series in history.
Still, for parents more concerned about how late games are ending at night, including Egg Harbor Township resident and teacher Pam Battersby, this year's convention timing couldn't be much luckier.
"I have a 10-year-old son who's having trouble staying awake for the games," Battersby said Tuesday as she was leaving the township's H. Russell Swift School, where she's a reading specialist. "So he was pretty excited about the schedule. ... We're all about the Phillies, so I let him stay up."
Jim Conroy is also a teacher - first grade, in Ocean City - and a parent. But his daughter and fellow Phillies fan, Madison, is just 6 years old and in kindergarten, so she hasn't been allowed to stay up to watch the games, no matter how often and how hard she pitches that plan.
"Please, Daddy, can I?" she pleaded again, after a guy asked her dad about the World Series and sleep schedules Tuesday outside Egg Harbor Township's library.
"Seven thirty is still bed time," Conroy answered patiently. "We'll watch the highlights in the morning."
That goes for himself, too - the games are ending so late these days, Conroy says, he can't stay up to watch them either. That's probably true even if he doesn't have to get up and teach the next morning, he added.
But Steve Magnam Jr. expects to see this World Series unfold live and in color with his son, Steve III - even if the boy is just 7 years old and a second-grader at the Davenport School in Egg Harbor Township.
The dad doesn't much care who wins the series - "I just like the comebacks," he said as he pushed his son on a playground swing. "I root for the team that's losing at the moment."
His boy, though, is a big Phillies fan, and he's happy to have a few days off at a key time in the team's history, going into the sixth game (and maybe a seventh) of the World Series against the New York Yankees.
Tonight, the father said, no doubt speaking for many other parents around New Jersey, "He can stay up and watch the whole game."
Contact Martin DeAngelis:
609-272-7237
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Posted in Atlantic, Atlantic_city, Cape_may, Cumberland, Ocean, Top_three on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 9:50 pm Updated: 5:17 am.
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