There was a plan. It worked; a decent sort of ‘end of the day’ dismissal plan for all the students in a sprawling urban school.

Students riding the bus, exited separately from those who walked home or were picked up by family members. The walkers went to the gymnasium where they sat patiently in a line on the floor with their teachers hovering nearby. The man responsible daily for opening the big metal school doors, turning on the microphone and conversing with parents, arrived by 2pm and got the whole process started.

There was a plan.

That was last year.

This year, an administrator decided things should change.

‘Some people were not doing their jobs’, was the rather ominous and vague explanation as to the necessary adjustment thrust upon staff and students.

No one was happy. The new dismissal plan launched.

Instead of lining up in the gymnasium, entire clusters of walkers and disgruntled staff tromped outside to wait in bunches, sandwiched haphazardly between the greenhouse and garden, the large parking lot and an even larger playground area, half of which belonged to the school district with the other half belonging to the city.

Hastily printed cardboard signs pointed to where classes should congregate and hold in place. Some children wandered off in the direction of the park. Others ran off to meet confused parents and caregivers who upon seeing that the children were outside, sat in the parking lot and honked their horns. A few students wandered into the greenhouse and had to be rescued. A couple miscreants threw dirt at each other from the garden. The autumn wind whipped the cardboard signs mercilessly so that it was hard to tell where one’s grade was standing.

It rained.

Then came the winter winds and the bitter windchill and after a few days of frozen misery, and more dirt throwing, the unwieldy circus moved back into the sanctuary of the gymnasium.

Blessedly and just in time, the Christmas holidays arrived.

In January, the heavy hand of change lifted a creative finger once again.

Paper rosters with student names were deemed no longer valid. A quickly generated google chart, supposedly accessible on everyone’s phone fanned out into cyber space with not all teachers managing to successfully locate the appropriate application. Some miniscule boxes were checked. Some lists were abandoned and paper rosters were temporarily reinstated.

The microphone did not work.

On Monday, it was determined that the doors where the man with the non-working microphone waited, were no longer valid. They were closed and locked.

We dismissed horizontally; every student exiting one at a time; off to the far left door at the front corner of the gym.

One at a time.

All of them.

Blessedly, the next day school was called off due to excessive cold and slippery roads.

It’s a work in progress…