At the right time of day, you can hear an elementary school before you can see it, and if the air is still and the natural acoustics favorable, the discordant symphony of America’s youngest students at recess is an auditory blessing.
The beautiful racket that boils from an attack on playground equipment or a race around it or any of the thousand other impulses bursting from dynamo bodies and newly freed minds has a clamorous harmony like nothing else.
There’s one school I walk past almost every day, through the park across the street, then back across the full span of its architectural footprint. With or without the soundtrack, I look for only one thing — someone who looks out of place, or who is carrying something that looks out of place, but more bluntly, someone with a gun.
Since about Columbine (1999).
There is no school at Richneck Elementary in Newport News, Virginia, this week because last week ended with a first grade teacher getting shot in her classroom by a 6-year-old.