Bang

The first semester at ConVal ended last week with a bang -- literally.

Somebody shattered a toilet bowl in the downstairs boys’ bathroom with an explosive device, probably a firework of some kind. A couple of my journalism students spotted the commotion and acted like journalists, which made me proud. They hung around, pestered administrators, custodians, and bystanders for quotes, then came racing into the classroom and started writing.

An hour later, a girl told the adminstration she’d found a bomb threat in the downstairs girls’ bathroom. The administrators had no evidence the two events were linked, but the coincidence made them uncomfortable enough to order everyone at school to ‘shelter in place.’

By then I was in the cafeteria on lunch duty with half a dozen other teachers. We herded the complaining multitudes into the theater and locked the doors. There were about 250 students and other teachers jammed in there (seating for 200), including a Theatre Arts class in full costume and makeup that was about to put on their final exam.

By this time I had added two and two and surmised it was not a drill.

Then everything changed again. We were all told to leave the theatre, get our outdoor clothes on, and move outside into the parking lot to our prearranged fire drill assembly points. It seemed odd at the time, but we later learned that a third suspicious event had just occurred, which I’m not going to describe for fear it will give somebody else ideas.

It wasn’t as cold as it had been recently, but it was cold enough. One of my kids saw another student with a white face and asked me if she had frostbite. It was one of the theatre students, still in makeup.

A number of students were missing, and had to be run down or accounted for. While police and staff searched the building, rumors blossomed in students' minds. Cherry bombs mutated into real bombs, and an M-80 (a powerful firecracker) turned into an M-16 (an assault rifle). Students everywhere were on cell phones, and the office phone lines were jammed with anxious parents calling in.

After the gymnastics room had been searched, administrators gave the okay for lightly dressed students or those with medical conditions to go inside. But the word never got down to me, or to many other teachers. When kids got into cars to warm up, we rousted them out, as has always been the custom. There aren’t cars enough for everyone.

Then we got word to let them get into cars, but they were not to leave.

Then, when the buses started arriving, we were told not to let students with cars leave until the buses had been loaded. Then that was countermanded, or so we thought, and the parking lot became a nightmare of cars weaving between crowds of students and teachers. It turned out there had been no such release order -- some kids just made it up.

Eventually, everyone got home safely. It was a discouraging experience in many ways, and I found myself thinking about a day in the spring of 1971, when I watched Harvard’s Center for International Affairs burn. Somebody had set off real bomb in it to protest what they thought was its role in the Vietnam War. A young professor of mine stood next to me and said he felt like a blacksmith in 1920. He thought the university was finished.

But he was wrong. Universities aren’t finished, and neither are public schools. Our cold, frightening, confusing, and depressing day was only that.

Everyone came back the next day and we started exams.