Apathy Jack writes:

I’ll miss some of the things about Hoodrat...

While looking for our tech guy to tell him that our good TV was broken, I pass the library, freshly tagged with four foot high scrawlings. Shortly thereafter, I wander to the canteen. On my way there, the Deputy Head Girl shows me the girl's toilets. They are covered in blood. I don't mean that there were a few splotches - there are always splotches around Hoodrat - I mean there were pools of it on the floor, handprints smeared across the wall. I follow the spoor through the corridor, until I meet the Guidance Councillor following it from the other direction. Leaving him to deal with it, I walk back past the bathroom, where the roving cleaner the school employs has already cleaned the worst of it, and I walk past the library, which is in possession of several shiny spots, where the graffiti has been scrubbed off.

It may be putting a band-aid over a bullet hole, but I will miss it.


Some things I won’t miss...

It wasn’t only the English department employing relievers at the start of this year – there were three Technology (what we used to call Woodwork and Metalwork, rolled into one) classes being babysat because Hoodrat couldn’t find a teacher. At least the ten English classes were doing work - the Tech classes were having no relief prepared. So, after eight weeks of the students playing touch rugby outside a workshop, Hoodrat Management have given up trying to find a teacher, and have dissolved this option. This means that several dozen students don’t get to do Technology, but rather have to integrate themselves into other classes two months into the teaching program.

Some students are talking about complaining to the Principal. Others are talking about going straight to the press. At least one member of staff has mentioned going not to the Ministry, but all the way to the Minister of Education to have this clusterfuck exposed.

It really won’t suck to go to a school where this sort of thing doesn’t happen.

(And in answer to those who ask how I can be sure it doesn’t happen at the new school: This sort of unspeakable wrongness doesn’t happen at ANY school. Anywhere.)