The rocky start of this school year was only about 20 percent due to the blackout and about 80 percent due to poor planning. Too many problems complicated the beginning of the school year.
One main problem was how hot, hot, hot the school was. Some classes – like Mark Trexler’s history room – don’t have any windows and stay stifling hot most of the day. Other rooms, even though they have windows, – like Mary Corridore’s Spanish class – push 91 degrees at times. How are students expected to learn when they feel like bread baking in a 350 degree oven?
A hot classroom is not conducive to learning. And here’s the worst part: the plans for the new school construction do not call for air conditioning. Since there will be no air conditioning, the school should invest in more fans.
An even bigger problem was lockers. There was no reason for students to be walking around without lockers, especially three weeks into the school year. Locker assignments need to be done at registration, as done at most other schools. Hundreds of students were carrying around their books, binders, notebooks, and other miscellaneous school materials all day because they had no locker. That was ridiculous.
Meanwhile, upstairs O-house looked like a vacant lot with its rows of empty, unassigned lockers.
Then there was the registration crisis. It is understandable that the blackout caused extraordinary lines on the band/late registration day. But why so many kids waited until the last minute to register is a question that begs to be answered.
To lessen the registration crisis, extra help should have been called in so that the lines would move faster and be shorter. The school had to have known that the registration lines would be astronomically long with the freshmen not being able to register on their day, especially since there are over 550 freshmen.
That leads to another issue: The book depository lines are too long. Again, hiring extra help at the beginning and the end of the year would alleviate this.
The school year is off to a rocky start. Let’s hope the rest of the year will be more placid.