The Perfect Storm

The assistant principal and I had a big laugh together this morning. Somebody had broken into the school, kicked in the door to the office, then did an even better job of booting the door of our principal - to the point of knocking the door jam off the wall and halfway across the room. There was a muddy footprint on both doors when we came in this morning. The police had already been there - including the K-9 unit. We looked around, but we couldn't discover anything missing. This is probably about the time we busted out laughing. The intruder hadn't even bothered to disturb our principal's cache of granola bars.
The other reason we were yukking it up was that we could remember a decade of break-ins and vandalism. The fact that we weren't immediately faced with moving classrooms to another part of the building while repairs were done, or that we weren't out in front of the school doing our best to shield whatever innocence might be left in our kids by distracting them as they walked past three-foot (often misspelled) expletives. This was pretty low on the scale of violations.
This past summer, our school was "modernized." There are some bits and pieces left to be finished - we haven't had clocks or bells yet this school year - but the building as a whole looks quite nice. All the more reason to flinch when some fifth grader takes his orange Sharpie to the new tile in the stairway, or some of the local miscreants spend the weekend doing stress tests on our new tempered glass windows. It used to make me mad. Now it just seems inevitable, and I end up feeling tired.
Again, we were lucky. Last night at Peralta Elementary, they weren't as fortunate. An arson fire tore through their courtyard, damaging parts of the office, library and adjacent classrooms and canceling school for at least two days. The chaos that erupts when a school is closed for just one day unexpectedly is awesome enough, without figuring in the one-half million dollars in damage done by the fire itself. Schools are supposed to be safe places, after all, havens in the midst of the world's unpredictability. A school should be an island in the middle of that storm.
Maybe that's why we were laughing: We are mates on a ship sailing into that Perfect Storm.