About 25 to 30 years ago, I spent five and a half years as Buildings and Grounds Supervisor for a local public school district, not the same school I attended, but in the same county. I took the job when an old family friend retired from it. I've often wondered since how he coped with it.
To this day, I refuse to believe this school district was typical of all Midwest schools. It was different. The Superintendent was an alcoholic, the town drunk, if you will. I knew that when I took the job, but I had no idea how much it affected his interaction with the staff. Or lack of same. People openly joked about him around town. The School Board didn't have the guts to do anything about the situation because they were afraid he'd sue them.
The high school Principal was marking time for a few years till he could retire, and refused to rock the boat by engaging in any form of discipline.
The elementary Principal had not one lick of common sense. He had his doctorate, and one time after a snow storm he looked at the snow on the south side of a snow fence and commented, "We sure must have had a strong south wind to blow all that snow on the south side of the snow fence".
Of the student body, roughly half had a Mennonite background. Some were more dedicated to the order than others, but all were superb students. The other half of the student body were undisciplined holy terrors. They knew there would be no discipline enforced in the school, and acted accordingly. They'd bust outside windows in zero weather just for laughs. The night before high school graduation, someone put a sufficient amount of stink bait in the ventilation ducts in the gym so that graduation had to be moved to the gym at a community college in town.
A favorite ploy was to hide out somewhere in the school until it was locked up for the night and then emerge to create all sorts of mayhem. My night custodians locked up at 11pm, but there were too many hiding places to check them all every night.
I was normally the first one into the high school building in the morning, and one morning after a basketball game I found where someone had tried to torch the building. Someone had set some wooden soda pop cases in a pile against some wooden cabinets in the faculty lounge and set them on fire. Thankfully, the fire went out on its own.
The "you know what" hit the fan with a full scale investigation up to and including the State Fire Marshall. Then one of the students who was interviewed recalled seeing the School Board President's daughter, who had graduated the previous year, and one of her girl friends in an inebriated condition hanging back in the building after the basketball game when everyone else was leaving. Instantly, there was not one more word said about the entire event. Instantly, it was like it never happened.
I could go on and on. I stuck it out five and a half years, and one Spring about two months before the end of the school year I sat in my office one Friday afternoon and asked myself, "Why am I doing this?" I thought about it some more over the weekend and Sunday evening wrote a letter of resignation giving two weeks notice. I was an "at will" employee, so I figured if they could fire me at will, I could tell them to stick it at will. I didn't even bother to finish out the school year. I bypassed the Superintendent and hand delivered the letter to the School Board President the next day.
My successor lasted four years. But about then, the elementary Principal left of his own accord, the Superintendent and high school Principal retired, and a whole new regime took over. It had to be an improvement.
I apologize for hijacking the thread and going off on a rant, but it was a job I could have enjoyed until retirement, given a modicum of level headedness and support by the Board and Administration.
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