Them

"They tried to get into the boys bathroom." These were the words our head custodian met me with on Monday morning. It's usually over the weekend that they do what they do. They try to break in. They try to break things in general. They come to the school after dark and try to mess with it in ways that they could not during the daylight hours. This makes sense, in some darkly criminal way. Nefarious schemes are best played out under the cover of darkness.
And what would those plans be? By forcing one of the lower windows and attempting to break the glass out of another leading to the boys bathroom, they would have gained access to four urinals and three stalls. There are also four sinks, so they would have been fixed up if they were looking for a place to conduct their midnight ablutions. After that, I suppose they could have forced their way into the rest of the building, but this would have required another level of felonious skill that was obviously lacking in the way they went after the windows in the first place. Then they would have had easy access to hallways full of bulletin boards filled with student work. That may not have been their interest either. They were probably looking for a way to gain access to the classrooms, where there are pencils and paper, workbooks and erasers. Some of the teachers even keep candy in their desks.
Maybe they were after the electric pencil sharpeners or the fans. To date, none of the culprits has seemed the least bit interested in the classroom computers, perhaps because they already have one at home. No, they seem most interested in getting in. Then, I assume the trick is getting back out again as the alarm begins to sound and the police make their way to the scene. Trying to fathom the mind of these low-end culprits just makes me tired, but it does leave me with one lingering question: Who are "they?"