Much Ado...

As is typical of the beginning of the school year, there is a lot of drama. There are papers, meetings, schedule changes, adjusting to new grades with new teachers and new expectations. But most of this "drama" is really quite mundane. It is truly the volume of things to do in such a short period of time that can overwhelm. But the events of the past few days in our neighborhood did truly overwhelm too many people.

On Friday, a child at my sons' school was suspended for bringing a pellet gun to school. Some 5th graders on the Safety Patrol saw the gun, immediately reported it to an adult and the situation was resolved very quickly and efficiently. This was very unsettling, especially because the school administration didn't feel it was necessary to send any communication home on Friday. We had to wonder if a bunch of ten year olds had just saved the school from becoming another story of school violence. Rumors were rampant. Calls to school went unanswered. Our neighborhood was left hanging, wondering whether it was truly safe to send our kids back to school on Monday. There was talk of a group of parents who were threatening to storm the school at 8:30 Monday morning and demand a meeting with the principal.

This didn't happen. Communication came home Monday, offering an explanation of what happened and how it was resolved. News accounts filled in a few blanks that the school didn't provide.

But still I wonder. Our principal, a woman with small children of her own, went home on Friday and left her school hanging. She had to know that kids would run home to tell their families about the incident. She had to know that those parents would call the school and demand an explanation. How could she simply leave this neighborhood for the weekend? If this incident had happened at her child's school, would she have accepted her own action? I don't want to oversimplify a complex situation. I am not a school administrator and I don't pretend to know all the rules and regulations by which schools must be run. Perhaps some school board approval process prohibited the principal from providing prompt communication. I doubt it. I do think the principal may have acted differently if she were the type of person who knew how to treat all people.

Why don't people like our principal try harder to treat ALL others the way they would like to be treated? We weigh the influence and response of authority figures and people we may want to impress as we consider what to do in our lives. But too often we ignore the concerns of people we consider less well to do, less educated, or lower in our job hierarchy. What if we simply put some thought into how we would want to be treated were the situation reversed? Our world might be a little more pleasant.

Maybe our principal learned a lesson from all of this. I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I just hope she doesn't disappoint me again.