Bell rings. 82 bodies stream into my bottle-necked classroom door.
Over the All-Call system: “Would all teachers please send their red folders to the office please? Immediately, please. “
(scrambles, ripping through my filing system for a red folder) Red folder? What red folder? Crap. What did I lose now? I swear, I’ve never seen a red folder come across my desk all year… I guess I could have missed it. It could have been left out of my pile of opening day stuff & I wouldn’t have known. I didn’t get the memo on sub calls & that came back to bite me. But I didn’t know it was supposed to be there to ask for another one. Son of a… here we go again. We had 32 hours of meetings before the school year began and next to none of it was relevant; why take any time to go over day-to-day building procedures with a newbie? Nope, spending 4 more hours talking about the new teacher certification process (that doesn’t apply to 95% of my colleagues and that I’ve been hearing about for the past 2 years) was way more important.
(racks brain for where said red folder could be for another 30 seconds and gives up) After all, I may never find this red folder, but I will definitely get called to the principal’s office*, literally, if the natives get restless and someone gets maimed or killed.
Time to start another 90 minutes of pulling teeth. I try to start class with our usual routine, but my upperclassmen are all staring at me like I have two heads.
Female Student: “Aren’t you going to lock the doors, Miss Reed?”
(blinks, frowns) “No. Why would I do that?”
“Because they asked for your red folders.”
“What?”
“Were you looking for an actual red folder? I don’t know if you have one, but they don’t actually want them. They’re trying to tell you that we’re in a lockdown. Which is why you should lock the doors.”
(grabs lanyard, flies to the hallway fire door, slams it shut, kills hallway lights, flies back to classroom door to lock it, or at least wedge it shut, just in time to see the band director fighting with his door and then taking off his belt…??? (He told me later that the janky doors on his classroom had finally broken for good and he had to find something to secure his double doors. His belt was the first thing he could think of – he took off the belt and looped it through both handles and buckled it and prayed this was a drill. Poor guy conducted band holding up his pants with one hand and conducting baton in the other. It is completely irrelevant to this story that he had previously complained about those doors and the vulnerability they would have in just this type of situation. It took us another year to get them fixed.)
WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL? They have a lockdown code & neglected to mention that at opening day? You have got to be kidding me?! We went over all the steps that needed to be taken, but, in this post-Columbine world, I guarantee I haven’t forgotten the cue for a lockdown.
(flies to the back of the room with keys, shuts the door to the outside that is our only source of ventilation in the dungeon, then shuts the fire doors between the band & choir dungeons, flies back to main door to kill the lights)
Same Female Student: “Woah, calm down, Reed!”
(squints, trying to return heart rate to normal) “Why should I be calm?”
FS: “It’s not like it’s a real lockdown… wait – you don’t know what’s going on?”
(grabs clipboard, frantically taking attendance to make sure my students are all here & accounted for) “Nope – do you know what’s going on?”
FS: “Oh yeah, it’s Frankie Middleman**.”
(blinks)
FS: (eyes the size of saucers, gasps) “You don’t know!! All the teachers upstairs knew! I just kind of assumed they’d sent an email & all the teachers knew.”
(internally flips off the dungeon walls and wishes I didn’t feel like such an idiot, right now, in front of my worst class of the day) “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But you know? Spill it!!”
Female Student proceeded to explain that it was no big deal, just that another kid owed Frankie Middleman money for weed and Frankie had threatened his buyer with a gun if he didn’t pay up. Apparently, the wee pothead hadn’t paid up, so Frankie had brought a hunting gun (shotgun or rifle, I’m not sure) to school in the trunk of his car to show he meant business.
Thankfully, Frankie hadn’t brought the gun into the building; but he had said that he had it in the trunk out loud, which spread like wildfire, eventually making it to an adult’s ears. The admins had known about this situation for a while, but didn’t put us on lockdown until after lunch, when the police arrived.
Have I mentioned the dungeon was less than 50 yards from the student parking lot? While the dungeon had no windows that opened, there was a fixed window that was about 10-15 feet tall and about a foot wide. And 50 yards is certainly close enough for someone to shoot into my classroom with a long gun.
The next morning we had a pow wow with the entire staff to explain the situation and Frankie Middleman’s consequences (he was expelled, which was reasonable, I will give them that). The most ridiculous part of the scenario was how the superintendent, Satan’s Handmistress (you’ll meet her later), and Assistant Principal Twin Felonies went on and on about how terrifying it was to be so close to a gun and not knowing if it would go off at any time.
Really? Because just like in Beauty & the Beast, guns are inanimate objects that can come to life and randomly fire without being touched? (Before you start to argue with me, I realize there is a possibility of a misfire if the gun over-heated, etc… but that requires rare conditions and it was so chilly that spring morning that they were also complaining of standing in the cold and wearing jackets while the police conducted their investigation, which basically consisted of pulling Frankie Middleman out of class, walking him to his car, asking him if this was his car, asking him to open the trunk, asking him if he knew there was a gun in the trunk, and why he had brought it to school.)
Then Twin Felonies talked about how he had to touch the gun before the police arrived and how awful that was and so scary. Twin Felonies would have called Mr. Patriot (our part-time retired physics teacher who also did civil war reenactments and was a horse master for the movie, The Patriot, hence the name), but he had already gone home for the day, so the job fell to his truly.
Irony: turns out that the gun wasn’t even loaded. So scary.
You know what’s more scary than having to touch an unloaded gun when there’s absolutely no reason to do so, being as the cops are on their way and they aren’t afraid of unmanned guns? A person who is completely ignorant of guns, how they work or gun safety handling a gun 50 YARDS FROM MY CLASSROOM.
After I got my eye-rolling at all the gnashing of teeth about this terrifying situation they had created under control and the bell released us all to open our classrooms for the morning, I stepped aside and caught Twin Felonies’ eyes. Privately, I told him that I was glad everything was resolved without anyone being hurt, but I’m also sorry he was so uncomfortable with the situation because of the gun. I sincerely looked him in the eye and said, “I know that it may be surprising, girl, soprano and all, but I’m also a hunter and I’ve been gun safety certified since I was 9. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you find a gun and need to know if it’s loaded or not, please call me. I’ve been around firearms for most of my life and I can tell you whether it’s loaded or not, whether the safety is engaged or if something looks wrong and we need to just not touch it until the police arrive.” He blinked at me, rolled his eyes and walked away, shaking his head, without so much as a word.
10 minutes ago, he was monologue-ing about how terrified he was to be in the vicinity of a gun (that was laying, unloaded, in a trunk) and how he had to handle it and he wasn’t trained for that. Now, when I tell him that he doesn’t need to touch a gun if he doesn’t want to, because there is another option besides Mr. Patriot, and he just walks off?
Nothing like allowing a situation to become an emergency by waiting to handle it, complicating it by touching/moving evidence that in no way needed to be moved, then dramatizing it for sympathy to your staff later, all so everyone could pat you on the back and wonder at your ‘bravery’ in the face of that big, scary, unloaded gun. And when a staff member offers to help if a similar situation should arise in the future and you dismiss it?
Maybe he was just more okay with some felonious contraban than others…
*No lie – I was called to the principal’s office (via the all-call, just like an errant student) more in my first year of teaching than I was 12 years as a student in my home school. Most times I was in the break room, running copies (right across the hall from the office) or in my classroom (which has a direct call speaker AND a telephone). Nothing like a subtle way of telling everyone that that young teacher has screwed something up again like a building-wide all-call.
Even my students started making jokes out of it – asking why I got called to the office publicly when no other teachers did. Was I assigned detention again? Did someone forget I was a real teacher now again?
**As always, names have been changed.
Donita Westman 