Neglect

Off the Adobe Highway is a small elementary school composed of four identical classroom buildings, arranged in a row, a large cafeteria, an office, and boxy portable classrooms filling in the empty spaces. Anywhere one walks; one can hear the occasional zoom of a car speeding down the road. Anywhere one goes; one can smell the dry grass of the neglected field and the rank manure that helps the crops of adjacent farms grow big and strong. Anywhere one looks, one sees the tan stucco plastered buildings accented with light blue drain pipes and doors that are chipping to show the durable red paint that lies beneath.

As one walks down the hallway that goes along the side of the row of buildings, one will see weedy gardens stuck in the spaces between two of the buildings. If one were to look closely, they would notice that the only signs of a human presence in the gardens are purple and orange bird houses endowed with the hand prints and squiggles of childhood creativity like a pearl between the shells of a clam.

Further down the hallway is the cafeteria and a black top next to it. Off the cafeteria is an awning, over three picnic tables, formed by blistered, criss-crossed, wooden beams, making a roof of one hundred one foot by one foot squares, leaving one to wonder why it was built, for it is neither attractive nor offers protection from the elements. Next to the awning is a colorful map of the United States painted on the ground and surrounded on three sides by green mesh benches. Each state has wear marks from students jumping back and forth to certain colors in playground games.

There is a black top painted with four square squares, basketball hoops without nets and new looking hand ball walls on new looking blacktop that is mismatched from the rest. In the adjoined field is what appears to be a track but upon closer inspection is just a circle of short grass cut out of the longer grass surrounding it. Was there really only enough money, for physical activity, over the past fifty years, to afford a wall’s worth of wood, paint, and a lawnmower? Obesity is on the rise in America and this lack of sufficient physical activity equipment shows that not much is being done to help.

Across from the cafeteria and next to the black top is a huge library. It appears to be relatively new as it is noticeably lighter in color than the rest of the buildings. Its windows are shiny and clean and the screens are free from tears. A glance into a window shows a row of computers and nearly twenty shelves of books. It is an awesome quality that shows a lot of emphasis is being put into reading but it seems appearances and physical activity are being discouraged and compromised by it.

If one walks in between the last two of the classroom buildings, parallel to the road, one will find oneself in between two classroom portables. Each has blue ramp leading up to it; each with huge chips out of them exposing the old red underneath. Rings of red like rust appear at the bottom of the hallway’s support poles where the painter was too lazy to fill in the gap caused by the paint roller hitting the ground. One of the portables is painted with sunflowers and pictures one could assume were painted by the children who signed them. Behind this building is a wall covered with tiles, each painted by an individual student. Even though it is often over looked, creativity and expression appear to be encouraged as much as possible.

On the side of the classrooms, opposite the first hallway is a playground. There is a black top and like the other is painted with outlines for various games and has a broken basketball hoop and a tetherball pole with a sagging ball hanging loosely from the weathered, torn rope. But this playground does not look cheated by the state coffers as the other does, for it has monumentally huge castles of plastic playground structures surrounded by motes of tanbark. All of the structures are bright and new and untouched by nature. However, one must question if this was for the children’s enjoyment or out of fear of liability lawsuits and the current widespread fear of old school playground equipment. If one looks towards the front parking lot, in a presumably and hopefully off-limits area, one will see a pile of a dismantled metal jungle gym’s parts intermingled with the rusting corpse of a neglected metal swing set. The same swing set, whose spot it’s younger plastic cousin has taken. The conversion to all plastic, when the other playground is in such a bad state, seems wasteful, unfair. It appears over protective as none of the plastic structures have anything high to hang off of and the swings look to be about half as high.

In the field next to this playground is a neglected lawn that is a completely dead except for starbursts of dark green that are of over grown grass surrounding the sprinklers and ensnaring the water into a private oasis in the otherwise dead desert. The neglected quality of the field reveals a same quality of the school: the lazy and chipping paint job, the neglected playground, the phony track, and the lack of a sufficient number of classrooms. The green oases show hope, the large library, the expression employed by the birdhouses, and the creativity encouraged in the murals.

~~Danny