Friday, July 07, 2023

Skool Daze

So I was back in the old hometown recently, and took the time to seek out some of the schools of days gone by. Long gone by, since they have been demolished and replaced.

I should explain most of the schools I attended then were, well let’s call them “open plan. Clusters of one-story buildings with glass walls. Literally. Huge sheets of glass on at least two walls of every classroom. Never seemed like a sensible design for tornado prone East Texas, but we never had a tornado run rampant through a school (glass walls was a primary architectural feature of the district), so it all worked out.

The salient feature of such buildings today, with every classroom open to the outside and the walls only glass, is you can’t secure it from shooters. So all the school buildings have been replaced with multi-story solid wall structures with minimal access points. Which seemed okay until I saw the signs.

Two of them, prominently displayed at a middle school. It advised all who drew near that employees were armed and authorized to shoot. Not necessarily well-trained and drilled in how to handle guns in a tense situation, but that wasn’t the point. People on that campus were armed; and they would use deadly force. You were duly warned.

I tried for the life of me to think of where else in the world I might expect to see such signs. And all I could think of was a prison. A high-security prison.

Freedumb. And safety. Right? And paranoia. I live in the 4th largest city in the country. I’ve never seen those signs at a school, public or private. All I can say is, I don’t miss the old hometown, and I’m glad I didn’t raise the Golden Child there, and send her to those schools.

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