"Welcome to the jungle." ~guns 'n roses

Today was an eventful day at my high school. Around 10:30am we went into emergency lock-down, which has happened before (for bomb threats and drug busts), so that wasn't such a big deal; we're all used to those. I was with my class in the library and they kept working on their research (a lock-down just means that no one can leave the room in which they are located when the lock-down is initiated). Then one student went onto the local NBC website and found that our high school was the lead story. The headline read, "Tucker High Evacuated." That caused quite a stir among my kids, because we were sitting inside a school building and obviously had not been evacuated. There was a video on the website (it should still be on the front page) with a newscaster reporting from our school about a chemical leak, and the students kept playing the video. The school is a campus made up of 19 different buildings, and one building was evacuated because of a chemical spill. 16 kids were taken to the hospital. There were tons of ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, and news vans parked outside. Of course it was impossible for my kids to focus on their work when all this was going on. The headline on the website was eventually changed to "Some Students Evacuated at Tucker High School" and intercom announcements told us to stay where we were. The kids joked around, pretending to be sick, and kept looking out the windows, but they eventually got annoyed when we had to stay together in the library past the end of the period and into their lunch time. They were pretty antsy (and hungry) by the time we were finally released. So was I. At the end of the day they let us know that a student had released pepper spray in a classroom, and that was what caused people to be sick. That student definitely caused a whole lotta chaos, and he or she is probably going to face serious criminal charges. There's always something going on at my school. Last week it was a kid cutting another kid with a box cutter during the middle of a class (the inured kid was sent to the hospital). It's pretty sad.