Monday morning I got up, put on my good coat, and drove to the school at seven to clean out my locker, and I could not get into the lot because the PTO had gotten there first.
Marlene Suber was standing at the front doors with a folder under her arm. She has been PTO president four years running, she is not a woman who waits, and she was already talking before I got my truck door shut.
She wanted to know if anybody had thought to look at the cameras.
The head of maintenance had been in that town four months. What she did not know is that the PTO raised nine thousand dollars with a barbecue and a raffle in October of 2023 and put a door-security system on that building themselves, six cameras, front office and both wings, because a school two counties over had a scare. The district didn’t pay for a dime of it. It doesn’t appear on any district equipment list. The login goes to the principal and to the PTO president, because Marlene wrote that into the donation agreement in her own hand.
It took her and the principal about forty minutes in that office with the door shut.
The field-trip envelopes were kept in the front office cabinet. On the Thursday, at 5:20 in the evening, well after the office staff had gone, a man went into that cabinet with a key.
He was a temp custodian the new boss had brought over with her from her old district and put on the schedule without telling the principal, which is a thing you can do if nobody’s watching, and he was in that building four times that month.
They had him on video from two angles. He had the pouch under his coat before he was out of the frame.
The board meeting Thursday was standing room. I had not asked one person to come. I found out about it from the sign at the Hardee’s.
Half the grown people in that gym had worn my spare mittens. The deputy who does traffic at the ball field stood up and said he ate a granola bar out of my closet every morning of the fourth grade because his mother worked doubles, and he said it into a microphone with his hat in his hands, and that is when I had to go stand out in the hallway a minute.
The money came back. The man was charged. The boss resigned in June, and I will say plainly that nobody in that room asked her to and I did not either.
She came by my house before she left, alone, and sat on the porch and said the true thing — that she’d wanted an easy answer and I looked like one — and I told her she was young and to carry it and not do it twice.
The board voted me back with pay. Then Marlene stood up and proposed the other thing, and it passed before I could get back in the room to object.
There’s a sign on the closet in the east hall now.
THE WARM CLOSET. Mittens, socks, granola bars. Take what you need, tell nobody, ask nobody. Kept full since 1999 by a man who never once made a child feel like a charity case.
They fund it now. Four hundred a year, which is more than I ever put in and less than I’d like.
I’m back on evenings. Buses pull out at three-forty and the halls are mine.