And now for the bad news …

I posted about bad news at work a couple weeks ago. It’s taken me this long to figure out what I can and can’t do about it. I’ve still got to deliver the bad news to a lot of people, but I’ve let everyone know the basic overview of The Bad, so I can start to talk about it here, too.

Funding news came out on July 1st. We got one of the grants we applied for, and that’s really great. It will give us money to strengthen our health careers education and training program. It’s good news, and I’m glad the State chose us.

We didn’t, however, receive either of the other two grants we had applied for. And what that means is that about 400 people who are expecting to enroll in classes in September are going to be out of luck. It means is that I’m going to have to tell a lot of people they are out of work. It means I’m going to have a program much smaller than the one I was running just last month. It means it took me until the middle of this week to figure out how to maintain my own salary (after some soul-searching about taking a massive pay cut so I could hold onto one more instructor).

Our program will survive. And we’ll rebuild, we’ll seek new funding and start to work our way back to our current size and strength. But this hurts more than I can say. And the pink-slip conversations start tomorrow.