One Kind of Lockdown I Can Live With

Last year, my poor little school was under fire. At the crossroads of three gang territories and bubbling gang wars, we had regular lockdowns to ensure the safety of our kids. (See my previous post, "Lockdown City.")

This year has been a little bit quieter--no lockdowns during regular school hours, although many episodes occurred after school. I have been lucky to miss those after-school lockdowns. Typically they have been preceded by helicopters, in which case I run to my classroom, grab my stuff, and run out the gate so I don't get stuck at school for who-knows-how-long.

Now it's June with only two weeks left at school. I thought I had entirely escaped lockdowns this year. It was about 4:00, and I was cleaning out my room. My door was open because my air conditioning is broken--not fun on a hot summery day. I was vaguely listening to the clamor of kids outside when I heard the Voice of the Yard boom out, "Everybody IN! Everybody in NOW!"

Let me tell you about the Voice of the Yard. He's one of the instructors on campus running after school enrichment classes. I call him the Voice of the Yard, because no matter what's happening on the playground, he can boom his voice from one end of campus to the other with perfect clarity. He goes up to a volume of 11. So when he booms, kids listen.

When he yelled "Everybody in," I knew it had happened--a lockdown, more action in Highland Park. I thought I had dodged that bullet this year (figuratively AND literally), but no, two weeks before school ends and I'm here for another lockdown. It's like that veteran cop who's about to retire, and then on his last day on the job, he gets gunned down in a shoot-out.

I ran out my door and instinctively started to wave kids in. That's what I do, because my room is on the yard and one of the first places that kids run in an emergency. Anyway, kids started coming to my classroom, and then I saw what the threat was. It wasn't a gangster. It wasn't a thug. It was a huge swarm of bees. Bees!

As kids swarmed to my classroom, those bees slowly buzzed over the playground. Actually, there were two swarms. I've seen swarms before not far from here, but they were in the hills, in an area that is rustic and not urban at all. But to see this force of nature hovering over a concrete playground was just...so...weird.

Anyway, dozens of kids crammed into my messy (because I was cleaning) and sweltering (remember, no A/C) classroom. We kept the door open because, well, the bees weren't really doing much except making their way across our playground to some undisclosed home in somebody's house or tree. The bees knew what they were doing and they weren't very interested in us. In the meantime, jumpy kids watched from the windows and doors as nature's phenomenon passed by. It was really cool.

So we were in a lockdown. Oh, there weren't any long warning bells, we didn't lock the doors, and nobody was particularly worried. We just watched as the wonders of nature buzzed by. Now that's the kind of lockdown I like.