Quite a week

It's been one heck of a week here.  Students finished school last Friday, but the teachers still had to report Tuesday.  I was planning to go in for an easy day, finish my grades, tie up loose ends and get home early to get a head start on summer vacation.

But then the school district office burned down.  To the ground.  Nothing left (almost).

The fire started late Monday night, so only one person was there.  Blessedly, the local fire department has good policies in place to protect their people when they're fighting fires in windy, stormy weather (which Monday night was), so there were only a few minor injuries from fighting the fire.  But the building and its contents were a total loss.  A mind boggling amount of stuff was lost, but it is just stuff.

As I talk with colleagues and friends, the enormity of what we've all lost is starting to hit me.  Every part of our computing services is gone, so no email, website, grades, nothing.  Suddenly, Twitter and Facebook are the best places to look for information about anything.  For the first time in my teaching career, I didn't keep a paper grade book this year.  The main server I saved them to is currently rubble, but everyone keeps telling us that there is a back up.  They hope it works.  (Here's a comment that the computer tech at my school made: Everyone backs things up, but no one checks to see that the back up actually works.  Think about that.  It completely describes me.)  I don't know anyone's phone number or email address because it's all in my (melted and currently unavailable) school email.  I usually have information like that in a few places, but I had to learn so many new "systems" this year that I felt pretty proud of getting things done once.  One of the associate superintendents followed 254 students from kindergarten through 12th grade.  She kept samples of their work, she knew about their struggles and successes in school, she was trying to learn about the human side of education instead of seeing everything as a number or a test score.  Those students graduated last Saturday.  An article in the Sunday paper quoted her as saying that it was time to really pull out the artifacts and information she had and start analyzing her data.  It was all gone by Monday.  I'm amazed that people are able to make jokes and move on (my curriculum consultant referred to a legal pad as her "office" and said that the move into new, rented offices will be easy because "we've got nothing to move").

The community has jumped in to help out those affected by the fire and it has made me proud to live here.  I'm also pretty proud of the people I work with (either directly or indirectly) because it sure feels like a lot of people picked themselves up, put a smile on their face and got back to whatever work they could.  I know that we all will feel this for years, mourning the things we lost or celebrating some of the new things that happened.  It's been a wild week.