[jmecklenborg]

I don't get the complaints about the old schools. My grade school was built in 1912 and had no mechanical problems whatsoever. It didn't have air conditioning. The gym was on the third floor and was L-shaped. The basketball court wasn't close to being regulation-size and the backboards were plywood.

For tornado drills they packed a few hundred kids in the boiler room in the basement. The maintenance guys had pinup calendars down there, which was always a highlight.

And get this: it was a Catholic school so there was a big cemetery out back that we had to walk through to get to the playground. There were funerals all the time. So WE WERE SURROUNDED BY DEATH AND DECAY.

The only really weird thing I remember happening with the building was the time when I was in a basement classroom in second grade and a lawnmower sent a baseball-sized rock through the window (which was very high since we were in the basement) and directly into the blackboard. Somehow the thing missed everyone but it had to have been going 100+mph because it put a deep dent in the blackboard. It being a Catholic school, they didn't replace it, and so for years later all teachers had to write around the missing piece of the blackboard.

Also, all of our desks were original desks from either the 1910s or 1930s expansion. There was still decades-old graffiti carved into them. You could see where they had a janitor try to belt sand something out but some of these carving efforts were just too deep.

Also, the school had no cable hookup and only 3 televisions for 900 students. It was very rare that a teacher wheeled a TV into the room and we got to watch something. I was in second grade when the space shuttle blew up in 1986 but we weren't watching it because we quite literally didn't have the ability to do so.