The school was vandalized - badly - over the weekend, and today we had to send all the kids away and spend the day cleaning up broken glass, spent fire extinguisher gas powder, and strewn paper. It was a sad day, but apparently they've caught the kids and they're apparently not our students (yet - some might be rising 9th graders), which makes it better. Plus, while a lot of damage was done, it could have been much, much worse. A few computers were destroyed or taken, but not as many as could have been, and the English department was nearly untouched.
Problematic for me is that there was some speculation that the kids targeted teachers of Summer Bridge, as the jovial art teacher who got in a conflict with a student on Friday had his room ransacked - paint on computer screens, thousands of dollars in damage - and the classroom from which I teach was also badly ransacked. I wonder if I pissed some kid off that I didn't know about.
Better explanation is that it's all random. I was shaking in the morning, I was so mad and sad about it. After seeing how the community came together, though, with police, councilmen, alumni, workers, teachers, principals all cleaning up the mess, I'm left feeling proud again. We shielded the place from tv cameras and just went to work and, except for the multitude of broken windows, you couldn't even tell what happened as we left.
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3 comments:
That sucks Epiph.
I saw the coverage of the vandalism on the news and couldn't believe that some of the "alleged" culprits were as young as 8. Very sad!
As posted on the comments section of my blog:
"'These were unprofessionals, so they didn't do nearly as much damage as they could have.'
Completely true, which makes me shudder at how professionals could have messed it up even worse. Also, they [the newscasters and the lot] stated that the vandals were able to get an easier access to the windows because the contractors failed to replace the bars. If this is correct, couldn't City sue the contractors for, say, negligence?"
But, this incident shows that:
1) We (I say "we" because I'm still part of the City family) need better security
2) Ignorance knows no bounds, therefore we should try our hardest to eliminate said ignorance. Granted, it's not as easy as it sounds, but with people decicated to the cause, it's a lot more probable and possible
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