What a week!

This has been a crazy week!  Monday seemed tame enough, but at work things were chaotic, as usual.  I mean, chaos is standard procedure in my school.  Then, Tuesday morning, a girl in our sixth grade who had been suffering with an inoperable brain tumor died at 8 a.m.   For some reason, the principal waited until about 1:30 p.m. to finish the letter she wanted sent home to all the parents via backpack.  That meant we had to duplicate the letter, manually fold it and stuff it in envelopes, count it out and get it to all the classrooms by 2:30 p.m.  We have over 1000 students, so this was a monumental task.   Chaos, as usual.

We arrived Wednesday, as did about 10 school psychologists and social workers to try to help any children or their parents deal with this tragedy.  Little Amy hadn't been in school since early December, and I remember being very sad at that time.  

Wednesday afternoon, around 2 or so, the wind whipped up and a storm came through.  We lost our electricity and even though it was dismissal time (at 3:15) we sent all the children downstairs as if we were having a tornado drill.  Parents started phoning in asking what we were doing and whether we'd be dismissing the kids into this terrible storm!  Over and over again, we answered that we'd keep the kids in school until we felt it was safe to release them.  Parents started arriving at school to pick up their kids.  Why do they think their little sedan is safer in a tornado or a bad storm than a big, heavy school bus with professional drivers and a staff that had coordinated the routes around the closed roads?  There were many roads closed due to fallen trees.  The traffic lights were mostly out.  Extra cars on the roads help out a lot!  

We got the kids home safely that day and dealt with power outages at home, too.  Our power was out until midnight.  Ugh.  Fortunately, the refrigerator was not very full and we didn't lose too  much in the way of food.  We kept our freezers closed and that food was fine.  

The next day was Thursday.  I arrived at school a little before 7 a.m. and noticed that we still didn't have power.   One of my co-workers called the principal, who told her that we were supposed to have school that day even though we had no power.  There were about 40 schools without power that day.  They had all the children arrive, then let us know (unofficially) that they were going to release us early--around 11.  We only got official word at 10:15 or so!  That means that 1000 kids have to call home to be certain there is an adult to meet them.  Several of our phones weren't working and many of the children didn't know a phone number for their parent.  Some kids got verbal permission to go home with someone else on a bus, but the bus driver wouldn't let them because they didn't have written permission.  Needless to say, that was another hectic dismissal with confused kids and angry parents.  

Today was Friday.  Our school, along with about six others, still had no power.  I got to stay home today.  Sounds good, right?  We'll have to stay in school an extra day since we missed a day today.  Actually, we are still getting out a day early, however, since they already shortened the year by two days just about two weeks ago.  Confused?  Yeah, me too.   All of our deadlines have suddenly changed.  Ugh.

Another chaotic week at Hunters Woods!