This is where my 3 kids and I went to Jr High

[Omaha Steve]

It takes 4 minutes with a brisk walk and no other students in the way to get from the shop area to the music or gym areas. How safe is someone 4 minuets away from an armed guard with scared students in the way after a warning of a shooter?

My math sucks.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

1. Here in south FL

schools tend to be sprawling affairs, with doors that open directly to the outside. Then there are the "portable" classrooms of which Palm Beach County has 1,780. 447 of those are made of wood or metal and the newer ones are called 'concretables'. The effect is the same, rows of trailer like classrooms which create a rabbit warren of escape routes. It would take dozens of guards for each school here. Stupid NRA leadership...

[A HERETIC I AM]

2. "Portable" classrooms are the school board/districts way of saying....

"When we built this thing, we didn't think ahead."


FWIW, I graduated HS in Miami and in those days, the classroom doors opened right out into the open. I've since driven by my old HS (Miami Killian) and that has changed. They have added walls made of decorative concrete blocks that don't allow one to walk straight in off the sidewalk and into a classroom.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

3. The greater part of the problem

was the extraordinary population growth...we were part of that problem. We moved to Palm Beach Cty in 1987 with 3 children ages 5, 6.5 and 8. In FL the property taxes apportioned for schools are forwarded to Tallahassee, where the money is redistributed throughout the state. Palm Beach County always sends more money to Tallahassee than it receives back...just as most Blue States send more money to DC than they receive. It was impossible to keep up with the influx of school aged children even though new schools were being built every year. Some of that was due to the idea of an "optimum" school size, but part of it was because school boards knew the growth would tail off eventually...which it has. There are now fewer portables in use and it is not expected that the county will need to purchase any more. 91 new schools were built between 2000 and 2010 but the 1/2% sales tax that funded much of that construction expired in 2010 and there is no money...not even for the renovations desperately needed by older schools.

Everybody wants stuff, nobody wants to pay for it.

[Codeine]

6. We always preferred the portables when I was a kid in the 80s.

They were new, had better AC, and were carpeted and insulated. The regular classrooms, by contrast, were typical SoCal cinderblock affairs that were hot as hell most of the time, except when they were miserably cold.

Also, the walls of the portables had some kind of sound-deadening wall surfaces that kept everything quiet and pleasant, while the cinderblock rooms bounced sounds around and made the room a deafening nightmare when kids got wound.

[A HERETIC I AM]

7. Oh, I'm not saying they're good, bad or indifferent....

Last edited Sun Jan 20, 2013, 07:50 PM - Edit history (1)

I'm just saying that when they become needed, it just means (to me, at least) that they didn't build the building large enough for future growth.

I agree that a new portable is quite likely a better room than a 40 year old building might be.

So I agree with you on that.

When I first started at Miami Killian in 10th grade, they actually ran 2 shifts. Half the student body attended from 6:30 AM to noon or so, the other half from noon to 5:30. That was their solution for having too many students for the size of the building.

By the time I got to my senior year (1977 - yup..I'm an old fart!), they had done away with that because the student body had shrunk. I don't know if Killian has ever installed portables, but they may very well have.

[livetohike]

4. I taught in a portable classroom for one year

It had one door and a narrow window. The Newtown massacre gave me nightmares of my own days teaching....although it was decades ago. Anyone coming in through that door and we would have no means of escape. None.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

5. Exactly....

And, if yours was situated like so many others, escape for the shooter would have been easy. Really frightening.

[livetohike]

8. Yes....the school grounds had a chain link fence around it

The portable classrooms were up against the fence and that side of the fence was on the main street than ran in front of the school. I think we only had four or five portables, but it would have been easy to scale that fence and get away. This was in inner city Houston.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

9. My kids went to an elementry

school where the only thing fenced off was the parking lot!

[HereSince1628]

10. Safe? Apparently that depends on the phase of the moon cuz it's the lunatics, you know?

We REALLY need more psychiatrists in the schools to administer MMIC supplemental tests, so that we can ferret out all these latent monsters just waiting for the new moon to turn them into monsters.