This morning I went into work and was expecting it to be business as usual. I had my mind on what we were going to do in my chemistry class, but when I walked into my classroom I saw a couple of test papers sitting on my desk. The tests were for a World Geography class and one of my academic support students had taken them yesterday. I decided I should immediately get them into the interdepartmental mail (World Geography is taught on our other campus) and so I went to the office to do that. I'd never sent anything via interdepartmental mail before so I asked the principal how to do so. He was speaking with the assistant principal, but that isn't an unusual thing so I didn't think anything of it. He told me the drop box was in the district office so after I filled out the envelope (I did know how to do that it was more that I didn't know where the envelopes or the drop box were), I headed to the district office. I asked the ladies there where the box was a popped it into the bin. Then my day began to change.
One of the ladies, C, told me that we had no water and wouldn't for at least six hours. I replied that I'd been at the doctor's office one time when they lost water and had to shut down. Surely, as a school we couldn't, by law, have school without water. I, then told me that in the past when we were notified in advance school was canceled. C and I told me that they would still have to work, but they thought school would probably be canceled. I went back to my classroom to work because no matter what happened, I had plenty of work to do.
As I was working I got an alert of my watch. It was through my app for the local radio station and it said, "No school at SHS in Galena today due to water issues." At first this excited me because I could really use an extra day off. Then I went to talk to my coworker, K. We hadn't heard anything official yet, but she suspected we would have to go over to the other campus and hold classes there. That didn't seem possible to me, but I started think we might still have to do something on the other side (that's how the campuses are always referred to as this side and the other side, depending on where you are when you say it).
I went back to my classroom to continue working and then a few minutes later the principal came in to officially tell me the plan. We would go over to the other campus and basically babysit the kids when they didn't have classes for the other side. He asked me if I had any educational movies that would still hold the students' interest and I said I had The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. So I was going to head over there soon and pick up the movie on the way (I actually live in an apartment on "that" side).
Now you might be wondering, "didn't she post about a message saying school was canceled?" Well, I did, but it isn't that simple. The elementary school (prek-8)was canceled. The high school is actually two schools run sort of like they are two schools, but at the same time run like they are one school. Officially in Galena we have two schools (the Galena City School District also runs a boarding school and some of those kids live in Galena as well): Sidney Huntington School (the aforementioned SHS) and Galena Interior Learning Academy, better known as GILA. SHS is a prek-12 school for kids who live in Galena. GILA is a public boarding high school for students from anywhere in the state of Alaska. While the campus in town gets called SHS and the campus that was made from an old Air Force base gets called GILA the reality is the high school students enrolled in SHS and the high school students enrolled in GILA attend classes together and on both campuses. Thus, there are two issues with canceling the high school classes: 1) Only part of their classes are without water and 2) 230 of our 265 students live in a dorm. When they are not in class they have resident advisors and dorm aides who look after them. However, since this was a scheduled school day they are almost all off duty (there's one who runs the wellness room for sick kids and someone who runs the front desk, but otherwise it's an empty building during the school day). There's nowhere we can send them "home" to if we cancel school.
Thus, I took my papers and my computer to the other campus. I had just arrived and was about to head to my apartment to get my DVD when my principal stopped me. Change in plan. He'd had students asking about where I was because they wanted to ask questions on how to do academic things. He decided he was going to set me up in the dining hall and have me help students during the periods that they had me. Unfortunately, I had brought no books nor whiteboards (I have individual whiteboards that I use a lot during academic support since in academic support I am helping individual kids with whatever they need help on, mostly math). The dining hall director had a big easel pad of paper (because the GILA side is an old Air Force base the buildings are all separate buildings so the dining hall isn't next to any classrooms) and the art teacher was going to be working in the dining hall as well having the kids were on some art projects. She had some markers.
As the day progressed it eventually morphed into the kids attending their regularly scheduled classes in a variety of different locations. For the classes we made due with what we had available (Which was sometimes difficult because often the kids don't carry books around. For example the have a copy of their math textbook in their dorm room and then use another copy in class. I have additional copies in my classroom that they use when they come to academic support). Sometimes we had to get creative. For example, I had a student who needed to work on Algebra II. He didn't have a book, but one student had a book. So he used his phone and took pictures of the problems that he needed so he could work (actually several students did this). In another case a student needed to study for a trigonometry quiz (I was helping her). We started with practicing the problems on a worksheet she had previously done, but had with her and then I googled worksheets on the material she was studying and we used those problems to help her study.
Lunch was a bit challenging. Normally only about half of the students eat lunch on each side. Today all the students and staff ate lunch in the GILA dining hall. We started lunch ten minutes early serving the kids who were already in the dining hall first. Then the kids were dismissed to lunch by building to stagger their arrival in the dining hall. The food was a wider variety of items because more people had to be fed then were planned on. The dining hall manager kept encouraging people to leave the dining hall as soon as they finished eating. Before long we ran out of trays and people had to just balance their food in their hands (they were served in disposable serving dishes, but the individual items had to be balanced). Then, we ran out of seats and people were told to take plastic cutlery and eat outside in the grass (thankfully it was a sunny warm day, although warm is relative. The high today was about 55 F which for Alaska in October is quite warm). After a while she was kicking everyone out because they had to get the tables cleaned off to turn the dining hall back into classrooms (there were three classes, including mine, using the dining hall as their classrooms).
By the end of the day I had filled pages and pages (front and back) of the easel pad with lots of math and a decent amount of chemistry. Sometimes I had two or more students working simultaneously on different parts of the page (and on different subjects), but overall it worked.
After school was over I had a student asking me if first period academic support would be in the dining hall tomorrow morning. I told him the water was supposed to be back on by 2 pm (school ends at 3:55) so hopefully everything would be back to normal tomorrow. When I went to the SHS campus at 4:30, there it was still without water. I do hope everything will be back to normal tomorrow, but if not, I now know what I need to make the day more successful. I think everyone has learned enough that tomorrow will be an educational day even if we still have no water.
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