My account for today

Well, I had a very interesting day today at school. Here are some highlights:

All Day: Last day attending all classes

1st hour: This was the only day without my two best friends. They are seniors so they graduate early.

2nd hour: uneventful

3rd Hour: Dissection=gross!

4th Hour: uneventful

5th Hour: PARTY!!! We had a party on our last day of marketing II. It was fun, but about ten minutes before 6th hour we had a fire drill.

6th and 7th Hour: We started to watch the Clio awards (companies get awards for the best Superbowl commercials) in business management when the power went off. The door to the hallway was open, and we heard other kids yelling "YAY!!!". Then the power went back on quickly and we heard "OOooo." The power lasted for probably two minutes before again going down. Our principal Mr. Diver was communicating with the school through the P.A. system throughout the ordeal, however I feel that the situation was not properly handled by the administration. Anyway, the power flipped on and off for a few minutes, and then came on for about ten minutes. Mr. Diver came onto the P.A., and announced: "Attention students and staff, we believe that the power failures are o---" and the power went down. It was like they timed it or something. It was so unbelievably funny. Mr. Diver came on before this outage and asked that students remain in classrooms until further notice. He said that if the power goes out again, students should be in classrooms. I decided to stand at the door inside the classroom and peek down the hall to see what was going on in the hallway. There were a few students that I saw in the hallway scampering to their classes, but I wasn't able to see very far. It was absolutely pitch black save a little light that was coming through the window in the stairwell to the first floor. The power came back on a few minutes later.
A few minutes after the power came on, we were told that we could go to our seventh hour classes. The power remained on during transition time (thank god), but failed soon after 7th hour started. I had called my mom during 6th hour, but she didn't pick up her cell phone.
That's when the rumors started. The GP South rumor mill was going at full speed. There were four stories that I heard:
• Story 1: In the J-Lot, next to a somewhat major street and next to our athletic field a car had blown up.
• Story 2: A tree had fallen somewhere onto a student's car.
• Story 3: The roof of the S-Building was on fire.
• Story 4: A house near the school was burning down because of a downed tree.
This may sound silly to you, but since no one really knew what was going on, and teachers were just as clueless as the students rumors were bound to start right? Anyway as far as I know all of the stories except story number two ended up being false. I asked my 7th hour teacher if I could go outside for a minute to check and see if the there really was a burning car in the J-Lot, and I ran into an assistant principal Mrs. Yankee a rough transcript of the conversation is as follows (Quotes are what I remember to be the exact words spoken, non-quotes may have minor word variations)

YANKEE: Can I help you?

ME: Well I was just wondering if a car really has been crushed by a tree in the J-Lot.

YANKEE: "What's it to you?"

ME: "Well, I was just curious."

She then checked my hall-pass, and I went on my way. I traveled down the hall to the gym, made a left and went outside. I went to the athletic field where a few seniors seemed to be walking the track for the last time. I looked over to the J-Lot, and of course, there was no blown-up car. I then went alongside the tennis courts on the sidewalk towards the Main Building, and passed the doors to look over the front lawn. I saw a fire truck and an ambulance parked on Grosse Pointe Bvld. I then went back to the side doors and went inside. When I got back to the classroom the class was watching anime that a student brought in because we had extra time. I told everyone that all of the rumors were false, because I didn't see the downed tree, because it was blocked from my view. We had a few more minor failures, and at around 2:43 Mr. Diver came on the P.A. and announced that we will have early dismissal.
In conclusion, I must criticize the administration on their handling of the situation. I think that they could have done a much better job of getting information to the students and staff members who had nothing but rumors to go on for information. As a student, I can say that I was fairly on edge about the situation because I didn't know what information to rely on. Generally, you should ignore rumors, but you don't know if the administration told someone who told someone who told you or if someone made it up and told someone who told someone who told you. What keeps popping up in my mind is the idea of a back-up generator. Why doesn't the school have one? Even with the budget deficit isn't the loss of the last day for in-class preparation worth a few thousand dollars for a generator. If Mrs. Yankee, Mr. Diver, Mrs. Murphy(the other assistant principal) are reading this, I hope that you take my comments to heart. For those of us who didn't have the air conditioning, it was uncomfortable.