If it ain't broke...

Last night, the general editor of my school's newspaper got up and spoke in front of the Dallas ISD school board. He was there talk about the need for major repairs and a general overhaul of our campus. It's a 50 year old building, and you can see immediately that it has aged poorly.

In a stroke of irony, my classroom ceiling sprung a leak yesterday right next to where he sits. It waited until about five minutes after he left, but there was serious condensation dripping for a few hours in the afternoon. 

The board approved a plan to fix nine facilities to the tune of millions of dollars, and our campus gets the largest piece of that pie. It's about time, too. Older buildings often have quirks, but some of our problems are downright unmanageable. I mean, you can't have water fall from the ceiling in a computer lab. It's just a stupid thing not to fix. 

Some rooms are cooled to the 50 degree range while others remain in the 80s all day. Ceilings drip. The first floor has an unholy stench about a third of the time that's likely something we shouldn't speculate about. The probable answers are too gross. I have ten windows in my room. Three of them open. Things like that are the daily frustrations of working in a building constructed five decades ago on the cheap. 

To their credit, the regular maintenance folk are out there all the time. There was a man halfway in the ceiling before the first class started this morning. 

There is almost always someone fixing something on campus, but they know the same thing we know. They're applying band-aids at best. 

As for my persuasive speaker, I genuinely couldn't be any more proud of the guy if I tried. Because half of my classes involve teaching some level of public speaking, I know how rare it is to find a teenager who can confidently stand in front of a crowd, let alone the school board and an assembled audience, and talk about an issue that really means a lot to him. The kicker? He's set to graduate in under three months. None of these improvements will happen while he is still a high school student. He spoke up for those who come after him. 

Well done, young man. Well done.