Outside of West Hill, as you drive up and enter the parking lot, you’ll notice a sign that says “Facility Renewal Project” and it’s by the TDSB and something about investing in childrens’ futures. When we all noticed it, I’m sure we all thought “About frigging time.” I swear, the place is falling apart. The futile attempts at making the place look better last year failed. Nothing looks uniform, there are nasty brown patches everywhere, and there were holes or things crumbling all over the place.

If you search on Google for the words ‘tdsb’ and ‘incompetent’ in the same search, you’ll find that one of my previous posts is the top spot. I’m quite proud of this achievement, although I have this feeling that one day, it will come back and “bite me in the ass,” so to speak. So I’m going to use my ‘influence’ and shout about how much the TDSB sucks again in the hopes that this will make a difference. Yes, wishful thinking.

For the past week, the music room smelled horrible. It was fumes from tar or something because they were redoing the roof over the music room. One class, it got so bad, we moved to the cafeteria. Everyone was such in awe of our sight reading of ‘Raider’s March’ from Indiana Jones, that they left. Yeah, we were pretty loud and the cafeteria wasn’t empowered with the might of acoustics to absorb the sound, so there were echoes.

Today, we toughed it out and played through a few pieces, like the Ukranian Bell Carol and Sleigh Ride. At one point, it was supposed to be a pause and during that pause, the roof started rumbling and the sound of a chainsaw like thing was audible. Everyone went ‘Holy crap!’ Apparently, it was worse yesterday and a few days ago.

Yesterday morning, I got to school and started opening my locker, when I felt a strange substance on my lock. Sure enough, it was some sort of drywall kinda thing that got painted on. I checked the lockers around me, and all of them had this white crap painted on it, in different spots. I was bloody pissed, and I went to the nearby fountain to clean off the crap from my lock. Unfortunately, the bastards put the stuff in the hole where my lock goes, so it will always be in contact with my lock unless I somehow clean it out.

This begs the question, what were the bloody idiots thinking? This sure as hell can’t be students doing it, since it’s drywall stuff. It’s gotta be those contractors. And why in the hell are they painting crap on students lockers? Even better, why were they painting over students’ locks? How about I paint some drywall crap all over your bloody doorknobs, retards? Needless to say, once my friends got to school to find this crap all over their lockers, they were steaming pissed off. I should see how long it takes for them to clean this garbage off.

Back when we were getting our exam schedules, someone noted that the brilliant personal exam schedule was a colossal waste of paper. Someone else mentioned that there was a petition going around trying to address that. Our teacher asked who signed the petition. They said it was students. The teacher then told us that if you ever wanted to get something done, get your parents to do it. The administration doesn’t listen to students and they don’t listen to teachers. Get parents to contact the school and be angry, but polite, maybe even outraged, but polite. It’s amazing, she said, how little say teachers actually have in how things are run at the school.

My music teacher wondered today, why we’re putting up with all of this crap. Why are we taking it? Why aren’t our parents coming down like a frigging hammer on the school? If this was an elementary school and we had to put up with this crap, the administration would just get their asses kicked.

That’s a good question. Why don’t we get our parents to improve the situation at our school? The optimistic little demonstrations of civil rights and democracy like petitions are going to get students nowhere. Why do we take it and just go on?

My parents and my uncle and aunt have some interesting conversations over meals. One time, they were talking about something that happened in my cousins’ high school, something like marks and stuff. So they went and complained. Apparently, the school’s administration is afraid of them and they know that when they have to come and complain, they really f’ed things up.

Of course, even after saying that, I’m not going to involve my parents until there’s something that’s really serious, like preventing me from getting into university kinda thing. The most I’m going to do is write about this crap that goes on and hope that my posts float to the top of Google someday and that there’ll be some kind of exposure or revolution of the proletariat.

Tags: School, tdsb, toronto, west_hill

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2005 at 5:10 pm and is filed under School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.