Cleaning up the playground and other ways to get into trouble....

Back sometime in the late 80's my children went to Wilson School. It was sort of in the hood. No, I guess it really was. Every day I would drop them off and noticed all the trash that was on the school property. A couple times a week I would work in the classroom or the school library, to help out. On those days I would get a closer look and noticed there was broken glass all over the playground and  trash everywhere. There was a big dumpster in the parking lot. The kids in the neighborhood would come around and talk to you if you went there after school. If you were looking for the janitor, he could always be found sitting in the boiler room doing pretty much nothing. 

One day I loaded up my home trash cans, went to the store and bought a few rakes and a snow shovel. Loaded a cooler up with Popsicles, ice cream sandwiches and the like. Drove my pick up truck over to the school on a Sunday and with my three sons we started to clean up the school grounds. Soon, some of the neighborhood kids joined up. I promised them a treat if they worked hard. We took load after load of junk to the dumpster. After a productive afternoon things were starting to look pretty good and the dumpster was full. I gathered up the tools, passed out the treats and we sat down to look over a job well done. 

Monday morning I went in to the library to volunteer a little and a little bit into the morning the Secretary came into the library and told me that the Principal wanted to see me in his office.  That is what I thought would happen. He would figure out who cleaned up his whole playground and thank me. Maybe even give me a gift card to K-mart or something nice. Nope!! When I went into his office he asked me if it was true that I had something to do with the clean up over the weekend. Why yes, yes I did. Then he got kinda pissy and asked me to not ever do that again. What?? What are you talking about? Is it a bad thing that the playground and parking lot are clean? It took all of us all afternoon. 

He then explained to me that the school board was making a scheduled visit that day to see if he really needed more funding to hire another janitor. He was letting the playground get that bad in an attempt to have the school board see that the one janitor was overworked. Really? The one that is always in the boiler room reading the newest copy of Playboy? 

Some things really don't make sense to me. I am sorry that I screwed that up for you.