Elementary School

My son is in Fifth Grade this year, in the same elementary school he's attended since he started Kindergarten. (That might as well be forever ago).

His school is a small (relatively speaking) square brick building, built in the mid-1950s. (I've no idea how many students.) Walls of cinder block, with thick layers of yellow and blue paint. Those are the school colors, and a fresh coat of each is applied each August before the school year starts. And each year, those walls are quickly filled with writing and drawing and essays and classwork and art projects — seeing that stuff is my favorite part of going to the school.

My son attends an after school program most days, and by the time I come to fetch him in the late afternoon, the school is mostly empty, and as I'm making my way to a playground at the other end of the building, if I stop to linger and look at the Fourth Graders' interpretations of The Starry Night, that doesn't arouse any particular concern.

As my son and I were wandering the halls in the late afternoon, we passed his First Grade classroom. It's empty now — he had been part of a small class that was part of a Special Ed program, but all of the students in that program have been consolidated in another school in the district, and the classroom was left unused.

I remember visiting that classroom with him, to meet his new teacher, a few weeks before school started. He was excited to be starting First Grade, and more eager to explore the new classroom than to meet the teacher. I hadn't expected to see it empty — you don't expect to see a completely empty classroom in a school this time of year.

I've often wished to find a way to keep my son six-years-old for just a bit longer — but that never did work out. He's now ten, plays an instrument in his school band, he hasn't seen Star Wars yet, but he's a voracious watcher of documentary television — no, really — and is a constant source of surprise. I forget not to take that for granted.

The thoughts of the parents whose children are now forever six-years-old, trapped in amber, and of empty classrooms in an elementary school are profoundly, unspeakably sad.

My wife and I had to explain — to struggle to explain — everything that had happened, in a school very much like his, to my ten-year-old. We were concerned that he'd hear about it from classmates, or idle schoolyard chatter, and we just wanted him to know enough not to be afraid.