Closing Time

 A few weeks back, the school district dispatched a team of painters and electricians to cover up the bare spots on our numerous hand rails and replace the burned out light bulbs scattered about our site. They spent two weeks here. This is not a rap on the gentlemen who came to perform these services. They stayed busy with all the hand rails and light bulbs that had become tattered or burned out over the course of the past several years. Instead, I would like to point to the insistence on getting a fresh coat of varnish on the deck chairs of a ship they have designated as The Titanic. 

Our kids are walking past numerous cracked and broken windows. The drinking fountain outside of the boys' and girls' restrooms has been limited to a dribble on just one of two faucets. The playground, the one I have written about here several times, remains a pit of despair. The hole in the rubber mat that contributed to the fracture of one of our fifth graders' foot remains a hole, even though in the months since the accident our girl's foot has healed. 

On Monday morning, my principal called to me from the bottom of the stairs. She wanted me to come down and listen to what she thought she heard. She thought she heard water dripping inside the Mechanical Room. The Mechanical Room is where the boilers for the heaters that warm the school are located. Once I reached the bottom of the stairs, I could hear it too. When I opened the door, I saw ladders standing below the large pipes that run across the ceiling of the concrete bunker of a room. From one of these pipes, water was falling. Something more than a trickle but not quite a rush. The bright spot of this malfunction was that the water was hitting the cement floor just a couple feet from the drain installed for just such an emergency. 

And this is what I thought, after I took a picture to send to Buildings and Grounds: They don't need to close our school. The school is closing itself. The years of neglect and the consistent avoidance of regular maintenance has finally brought us to the brink. The good news may lie in the fact that a leak in the boiler system won't affect kids during these warm spring days before we all head out for two months away. There are water fountains inside, and when the filtered water cooler outside our office works kids can fill their water bottles to stay hydrated. Our kids have become accustomed to dodging the cracks and holes on our playground. It's the adults who regularly find themselves twisting an ankle or tripping as they make their way across the blacktop. 

A number of parents have told us that the Student Assignment Center has called them to ask why they said they would be returning to Horace Mann. "It's closing, you know." 

I know. Better than most.