New School Buildings

This has been a week of visiting new schools. Last night, my son and I attended a play at the newest high school in Randolph County. It is a lovely new building with an extensive parking lot. The music teacher with whom I spoke on the phone to reserve tickets advised us to arrive early as they expected a sell-out crowd. When we arrived, we were amazed to not find a parking space AT ALL. I couldn't imagine the play being that popular or where they'd seat all these folks. As it turns out, Randolph Community College doesn't have a space big enough to host their own graduation, so RCC's graduation ceremonies were going on in the gym and cafeteria while the play was next door in the auditorium. Talk about multi-purpose rooms!

I graduated from high school in 1972 (my daughter affectionately refers to it as "Pangea High", Pangea referring to the supercontinent that existed before the continents separated). It has been at least that long since I attended a high school musical. Despite the remarkably contemporary architecture and considerable change in the audience's attire (I was not allowed out of the house back in those days without a girdle, make up, and hose), little else had changed. The high school actors all looked like kids I'd gone to school with--no kidding, I swear they are all in my yearbook. The actors were exuberant and did a really good job. The audience was supportive and enthused to see their family members/friends on stage. The props were clearly student made, but clever and well done. And the sound was abysmal. How all this time has passed and engineers still haven't figured out how to make a student's voice intelligible in a school auditorium is beyond me. The play was about the cartoon strip, "Peanuts", which is pretty timeless, so it was not hard to feel pulled back in time to my own high school musicals.

We had a really good time seeing the play but it was also great to see the new school we'd heard and read so much about. This morning, we went to a fund raising yard sale at Woods Charter School which also has a brand new building. My children attended a charter school in Siler City. My son has friends who transferred to Woods Charter when their parents moved further east so we'd heard a lot about the move to new digs. Charter schools are not provided building funds by the state so finding a place to hold classes can be a challenge. And raising money for a school building is an even bigger one. Woods had been holding classes in empty retail space in a strip mall. My kids' school had been a private school before they went charter. They already had a school building. But when they decided to add a gym, the fundraising effort was enormous and it has taken them several years to get the building up and the nice flooring in. I couldn't imagine what the Woods parents had gone through to get this gorgeous school building up, though the size and organization of the yard sale was evidence they could handle a fund raising project.

Which brings me round to the issue of parents. I know the students in both schools are enjoying their lovely buildings. But both activities, the play and the yard sale, could not have happened, much less happened successfully, without a huge input of parental volunteer time. All the time my kids have been in school, I've either been running a small business at home, or working and in school. And these last three years I've been a single parent on top of it all. One of my big regrets is that I have not been able to volunteer at their schools. I've tried to make up for it by writing checks, which I know does help, but checks don't get kids to rehersals or unpack boxes of donations. And my kids have still not forgiven me for never chaperoning a field trip. The other side of this equation, however, is that the more people there are involved in a project, the more opportunites there are for conflict to arise. I've yet to meet a teacher without a collection of parental horror stories. It's only human nature that when someone has put a great deal of effort into a project, they develop a sense of ownership. I can see from here that, like classroom management, I'm going to need some mentoring to negotiate this turf. Sonja? Maddie? Do you carry your cellphones at work?