It's been a while since I've written something. In fact, it's been so long that I've had several emails about "hey! Want to write something?" in my inbox. Frankly, I don't feel like I've got anything interesting to say. But this happened today, and I felt like it would be a good time to talk about what's been happening in my daughter's school district.
This afternoon, I was taking a break from studying and idly scrolling through Twitter. One of the people I follow put up a tweet about the high school being on lockdown. The high school right next door to my daughter's middle school. Nope, hadn't heard that. In fact, I just did a Google search about it - there's nothing. Then we got a letter from her principal.
More about my parental whinging after the orange scroll-y thing.
For the record, I live in Douglas County, Colorado. Our school is living with budget cuts, some major turnovers in our administration (this fall, we will have our third principal in two years and possibly our third or fourth assistant principal), and some serious communications issues.
As I was thinking about writing this, something struck me. This is the second lockdown our school has had in two weeks. Last Friday - last Saturday morning, actually - we received an email from our school about a lockdown that took place for most of Friday. When I started having a meltdown over this, it turned out it was a huge surprise for my daughter. Nobody said anything at all about not being able to leave the building, no sheriff presence, nothing.
This week we received a scanned letter, attached to an email supposedly from the district communications department. There was "police activity in the area" (a direct quote from the letter) and there would be sheriff's deputies outside of the school when the students dismissed for the day. No mention of picking up our students, other than needing to show ID at the front door. So I suppose that's better than last week. Oddly enough, the letter arrived after the conversation on Twitter. I don't know if this experience is typical in Douglas County or not.
But that's been our experience with middle school here so far. The thing that should have made me turn away was the abrupt resignation of the principal the day before the first day of school. We didn't. Not certain about what we'll do for high school.