Dusty exhaust fumes greet me when I enter the first locked door. Musty and humid air flatten my hair by the time I grab my keys. Stale urine odor lingers in Classroom 2, like always. My classroom smells stuffy and germy, the sort of stifling mugginess that requires open windows to vent, yet no windows open at the juvenile detention center.
The stench welcomes me back, for it remains for all time.
Unlike regular schools whose floors gleam to the point of looking wet, whose hallways smell disinfected and uncontaminated, and whose bathrooms are the cleanest they’ll ever be, JDC never experiences its summer reprieve from constant use, a yearly makeover that must withstand nine months of abuse. Carpets in my classroom barely get vacuumed daily; the cafeteria floor is rarely mopped, much less polished. All rooms are used 365 days a year, day and night, either by students or staff.
No matter how nice I make my classroom, it never stays that way.
It’s been 83 days since I left my classroom. Over that time, masking tape has failed amongst the Louisiana humidity although I live in the Midwest. In my office, someone has laid a broken Happy Birthday sign (how it broke I can only guess), tropical leaves that fell off my bulletin board border, old student folders, a reading book that isn’t the school’s. The wall clock that I hung from a hook on my bulletin board fell, breaking the hour hand.
I’m surprised the whiteboard is clean, as my head explodes during the school year when evening programs can’t find the decency to erase when they’re done. The water fountain doesn’t have spoiled cereal floating in it and artwork doesn’t cover every table.
The school IT department never came to replace the desktop monitors, so it’s difficult to put our boxes of supplies away, supplies we ordered in April, but weren’t ordered until after school ended. We only received one out of three boxes of copy paper; half of our notebook paper is also missing. The email I sent in the spring regarding four cabinets’ worth of textbooks, workbooks, and other supplies that we don’t use, were never emptied over the summer either.
Hardly surprising. JDC is always forgotten, the bottom of everyone’s summer to-do list, the Jan Brady of the district.
Yet the new school year energy that blossoms at the end of every summer is untouched by the funk, the fallen posters, the paper that acts more like fabric in the humid air. Teaching is a rare career that resets itself as the leaves begin to ponder changing colors. Everything is new again, no matter how many students I’ve had at JDC before, no matter how many students never left over the summer. I delight with anticipation of even small revisions from last year, of updating décor or bulletin boards, of starting fresh despite the stench that tells me summer is over.
The key is not allowing the odors of criminals and time past seep into the skin and take it home with you. The longer you can cling to the new school year’s energy, its buzz radiating through your pores with hope and promise, the longer it will be before you succumb to the doldrums, before the hypocrisy frustrates even the most patient ones, before you roll your eyes at everything.
If only I could gather that energy and contain it in a bottle to sniff from when the stenches of reality take hold.