I’ve had my first low-grade but continuing illness in a while over the last two weeks — the first week I was under-the-weather with an incipient or active strep infection. The second week, I’ve been the slow-and-sluggish way I am when I’m taking antibiotics.
Interspersed with that we’ve had enough snow days to choke even the most active school-deniers. There was the one on the Wednesday before Martin Luther King Jr Day, followed by a late opening on Thursday. Then we had a day of school, and then we had a long weekend, made longer by a snow day on Tuesday, and a late opening on Wednesday. Then Friday, and an unexpected three-day weekend emerged. And now, today, another late opening, with a potential early closing tomorrow, and a snow day or delayed opening on Thursday.
It’s been the snowiest or stormiest winter that I and many of my friends can remember, and there’s a guy I know who’s mocking all the “global warming” people as loonies. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong.
But I can’t help looking at the signs over the gas pumps, the ones that show me how we’re inexorably inching toward $4 a gallon here in the US… and the pressures that puts on bus companies and schools. I don’t really know how bus companies get paid, but I do know that buses are gas-hogs. I wonder at what point we’ll start seeing “school delivery crises” when bus companies can’t afford to deliver students to these large, centrally located schools that aren’t walking distance from anywhere.
On Saturday, I discovered (or re-discovered) that half-a-dozen children from my school live a few blocks from my house. Yet both of the local ‘school buildings’ have been converted from serving children into being elderly fixed-income residences. One wonders if there’s a life for them in the future as schools again, or how we’ll restructure school if the bus companies can’t afford to deliver our children to the school buildings.
