One Window Fixed
June 2nd, 2008Anyone taken a look at the weight room at MRHS?
I don’t know how it occurred, exactly¹—whether it was one gift, or the gift of many contributors— but the weight room at MRHS has been completely re-done. Walk in, and it’s an entirely different school; clean, modern, and high tech, and the feel of the place is such you know the work is valued.
Buildings mattered. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t spend as much on our homes and on our institutions as we do. Talk to any one of the kids who have seen the new weight room, and they can’t believe that anyone valued them that much, they can’t believe they are that important.
The next question the kids ask is, “Why didn’t they donate to fix the roof?”
I don’t know. I like to think they’re too smart of that. Fixing the rood is the absence of the problem. It’s only at MRHS that a child expects water to be coming from the ceiling. If the roof were fixed it would be normal.Creating a glorious weight-room was extraordinary. I believe in the broken window effect and I know small things make a huge difference, especially in school. The teacher who failed to enforce the small rules at the start of the school year had huge problems at the end of it. My classroom was never one where I worried about rules—after the first two months. By then I didn’t have to, because the kids were following them naturally. It was the little rules that mattered—hand out a detention in the first week for being tardy, and the rest of the year will not be a problem.
This was one of the points which Brian Pickering knew instinctively as a vice-principal. Mr. Pickering was famous for insisting that teachers be in the hallway to keep an eye on the students, because many problems start with a small infraction in the hallway. It helped, too—until the lack of problems made everyone complacent, and they stopped taking care of the halls.
That nice weight-room is a repaired broken window. It says, “We care about what you do” and it sends a message that the rest of the school—with the leaky roof, broken ceiling tiles, overcrowded classrooms, ripped and destroyed seats in the auditorium, pitted parking lot and general feeling of being “run down”—is not the norm.
It says, “we’re not going to do the minimum for you. Don’t do the minimum for us.”
It’s a badly needed message. When I graduated from MRHS, there was a sense that the building needed work, but it was roughly comparable to neighboring schools. Sure, Keene High had a television in every classroom, but that was a small thing.² In the decade since, every school in the area has undergone massive renovations and repair—except for Monadnock.
The school is an empty warehouse of a building, with a lot of shattered glass. Someone (or someones) took the time to repair a window and provide for the people there. Much more work like it needs to be done.
1 Yet another example (of many) why the school needs an official blog and it needs writers to handle it. If I’m not teaching a dedicated English class at MRHS next year, then I do hope to use that last period of the day to create a literary and news oriented blog for the school—an electronic version of the Pawprint. Something needs to be done to keep the community informed. ↺
2 The fact that nearly every other school district in the nation had realized the need for multimedia to be present in every classroom by the mid 1990s is just one of the many reasons I have to shake my head in despair at the rage some people feel about the TVs in the cafeteria. When September 11th occurred, my kids and I were listening to it via radio because there was no cable in the school and no TVs to get it. How grossly pathetic, and how grossly some have missed the point when it comes to what our kids need for education. ↺
Technorati Tags:Monadnock Regional School District, School Funding
June 3rd, 2008 at 7:00 pm
The family of Jamie Wood (the kid who passed away last year) donated money for the weight room. There was a small story in the Sunday paper.