With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
IS THIS all REALLY HAPPENING AT THE SAME TIME?
MARCH 22, 2023
Early in my time at Mullen High School, I had the most amazing day.
Actually, it was the most amazing 90 minutes of a day, perhaps the most eventful 90 consecutive minutes of my entire career.
It started with a call over the radio, something to the effect of: “we have a problem in the boys’ bathroom on the 200 hallway.” Normally, calls like this do not come over the radio, so I moved quickly out of my office and down the hall. I was joined by one of the assistant principals on the straight-shot route to the bathroom. As we approached, we could see personnel in the hallway, gathered and watching.
In we went and what I saw belied expectations.
There was a fountain of water gushing from a broken pipe up and over a toilet, arcing across the ceiling. It was a flood of water, a geyser. It was pretty amazing.
We have the iPhone video to prove it!
Seems a young man broke a pipe from a wall and this was the result. We had to shut the water down, of course, and our facilities staff was on that almost before I could catch my breath. My concern was being without water in this part of the school, but we were within an hour of the end of the day and I thought we could send students to other areas that had H2O.
Not an every day event, but not exactly unprecedented. Boys do things that are inexplicable. All kids do. The assistant principal and I headed back to our offices and back to, what I am certain, was the important work of the end of a school day.
Within a half hour of the Bathroom Geyser, he called me across the hall over to his office, animatedly. I was not accustomed to his voice being raised so I moved quickly over to him.
Water was pouring out of his ceiling, through the socket in which his ceiling fan was mounted. We had had snow the night before and this was clearly a massive leak not just dripping but spilling on his desk. That it was going through an electronic appliance was lost on neither of us. We quickly switched off the light.
Another water issue, another call to the facilities team.
Was it the end of the day yet?
It was not.
Within a half hour of the Giant Leak, the facilities director appeared at my office door. “Can you come with me,” he said. “I need you to see this to believe it.”
I was surprised to see him given the bathroom and leak issues, but I followed him out the door. If the assistant principal was not given to exaggeration, the facilities director was beyond dry. He exuded calm. In this moment, however, his demeanor said “get a move on.”
We walked into a storage room and therein was a man I had never seen. He was staring at an open electrical box filled with wires and breakers.
“This is the electrician who works with us,” the facilities director told me. I was about to cross the open breaker box when the electrician waved me back.
“Careful,” he said. “Watch.”
I stopped, watched for less than a minute and saw a foot long jet of fire shoot out of the box and immediately douse itself.
“That’s not good.” I said. I thought something rather different.
“No.” Our facilities director agreed.
“Is this going to catch fire?” I asked.
“I’m watching it,” the electrician said. “If it does, I’ll shut down the system.”
Which meant we would lose electricity throughout two buildings of the school.
“What’s next?” I asked?
“We can fix all this overnight,” I was told. The facilities director, who has since retired, never once let me down with a promise like that. He certainly did not that night. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ve got this.”
I returned to my office. I had no words.
I did have a prayer that the school did not catch on fire before the end of that day… and it did not.
90 minutes. 90 eventful minutes.
I have not had another 90 quite like those and the “Principal Manual” did not have a chapter on them.
If it did, who would ever choose this job?