Don’t tell anybody, because I’ll deny it, but if school started tomorrow, other than needing maybe half an hour to clean up a few things and put some stuff away, my room is ready to go. It’s not finished, mind you, but it’s the kind of unfinished where if someone who wasn’t me walked in, they wouldn’t be able to tell. No one is going to look in an empty corner and go “Weren’t you planning on putting your hex lights there?”

I have two more days this week before teachers are officially back on Monday. All good. Time for something to go terribly wrong, in fact.

The problem is, the whole rest of the building is not me, and I just realized today how much trouble the rest of the building is in. There were a lot more teachers back today, and … yeah. There are a bunch of things that absolutely must be finished in a week in order to open school, and … I have my doubts. And from what I’m hearing, although this is entirely hearsay, the other middle schools are worse off than we are.

There are no functioning student bathrooms in the building, for example. The bathrooms were all completely gutted over the summer, and the sinks are in but there are no toilets or urinals, nor are there any partitions, because you need the toilets in place before you put in toilet stalls. You literally cannot open a school if none of the hundreds of students who go there have anywhere to pee. Na Ga Ha Pen. And that’s before we get to things like none of the new reconfigured classrooms have cabinets or countertops yet. Like, you can have a classroom without those things? But it’s a big pain in the ass.

Our band and orchestra rooms are not remotely functional yet; I’m not sure about the details because I haven’t seen them. But what I did see is that when they moved all of the stuff out of those rooms– and you can imagine just how much stuff is packed into your average middle school band and orchestra room– they Tetrised everything into one of our social studies classrooms. And I chose that word on purpose, because there is no room in her classroom. All of her desks are triple-stacked on top of each other against the wall farthest from the door. There was a narrow path to her desk, but you can’t do a whole damn lot to get ready in a classroom that is completely full of shit.

There are a bunch of teachers changing classrooms this year, too, and for a lot of them one of the two rooms isn’t ready yet, so none of them can go anywhere, and …

I wouldn’t be completely surprised if the middle schools have the start of school backed up by a couple of days, is what I’m saying. We can’t even do e-learning days, because none of the kids have their devices yet. We can find temporary workarounds for the classrooms– worst case, we have a lot of kids in the gym and in the library for the first few days of school, and it’s whatever; we’re annoyed but it’s manageable. But if there are any more delays to the bathrooms, we’ve got a major Goddamn problem on our hands.