Schools out!

Wednesday was the last day of school for students. But as Teachers we did not have out last official day until Thursday! There is nothing fair about that - but this year it was a definite necessity as our staff is preparing to move into a new building.

We lost our gym to a fire in the summer of 2005. (I had actually been at work that day as I was finishing up a class I had been teaching. But at the time it caught fire I was at home packing for a trip to see Haley in DC when I got a call from a friend that said my school was on fire.) Since that time we have been limping along without a gym and waiting anxiously for our new campus to be ready. (The School District decided it was cheaper to build a new campus than it would be to retrofit the existing school and build a new gym. Roy Martin was opened in 1958, so it has seen a lot of changes, many of which it has not been capable of handling very well- like Air Conditioning and Networking for Computers!
Although we have been waiting somewhat patiently we are very excited to finally see an end to the wait. The new campus is supposed to be released on August 12th. And school starts on August 25th. If you do the math that really is not a lot of time to completely set up a new school- especially since we are not allowed in until 5 days after the 12th. As the District needs those five days to move in all the new stuff for the building.
The new building will be the first two story middle school in the Clark County School District. So no one has ever had to work in this model school yet. Which means we are basically the guinea pigs. (It will be very interesting I think. As there are some things I am still waiting to see how they work. Like the fact that there are no ramps to access the top floor!!) A few of us got to walk through the building on Wednesday afternoon and although it still seems to have a ton of work left it definitely looks like a school. I was very surrised at how small the rooms seem. The average size is 30 X 30. Which sounds small to me and looked even smaller. I am not sure how 36+ student desks are going to fit. Let alone how those are going to fit with all the other items like bookshelves, teacher desks, wardrobes, etc. I guess we will have to wait and see.
Let me just say that I am not excited at all about all the work that awaits me. I am nowhere near ready to leave the existing building, let alone ready to tackle the amount of work it is going to take just to get the new building with all the new equipment set up and ready to go. I think to myself that it will be okay because I have the summer to get it done. But when I look at my calendar for the summer, there really are not that many weeks that I will actually be available to work as there are many different activities that we are planning for these summer months.