I’ve been spending quite a bit of time at the School District 166 campus recently, as the Cook County Community Center Steering Committee and the ISD 166 school board grapple with the details of attaching a new community center facility to the west end of the school building. As the pros and cons are being discussed, my mind occasionally wanders and I remember school days spent in the building.
Most of the memories are good ones. The space that is now the Jane Mianowski Conference Room, named after a wonderful math teacher, school board member and friend, was once the cafeteria and holds pleasant memories. Plans call for the room to be re-purposed to be a multipurpose room, which would be nice. It would be a return of sorts, to the way things were.
A tour of the school includes the “old gym” where basketball games and pep fests used to be held. It makes me sad to see the once-glossy floor warped and worn. However, the lovely wood beams on the arched roof are still in good shape and will likely be left alone, no matter what happens beneath it. I’m glad about that.
One of the tour stops however gives me the creeps, just as it did when I was in junior high. The hallway that runs beneath the gym bleachers and connects the upper and lower halls on the west end of the school is virtually unchanged from when I was in school. It is a windowless cinderblock tunnel. The only thing that has changed from 30-plus years ago is there is no longer a yellow and black Civil Defense Shelter sign posted in the hallway.
I didn’t like that hallway from the first moment I saw it, but my dislike turned to dread after Mr. Knowlton’s emergency preparedness class on fallout shelters and shock waves and radioactive precipitation. I was stricken with fear as he explained the emergency procedure in the event of a nuclear attack. We—the entire student body, teachers, and assorted support staff—were to head to that narrow hallway where big doors would be shut and we would “safely” wait for the radioactivity to pass. Of course no one knew how long we would be locked up there. We didn’t know if our parents and pets outside the hallway would survive.
It was a horrifying image and one that gave me nightmares. I made it through junior high and high school and put the depressing hallway out of my mind. Or I thought I did. But standing in the hall, talking about potential renovation, I shared that unpleasant school memory.
A steering committee member laughed and said, “This brings up some emotional issues, doesn’t it?”
I had to laugh too. I hadn’t realized it, but I guess it does.
So, I have a request for the architects and engineers. Please do something to open up that dreary, dark and scary hallway. It’s not likely that we will need a bomb shelter at the school or community center. And having one simply inflicts unnecessary emotional distress on innocent kids—and apparently on adults as well!
Most fears cannot withstand the test
of careful scrutiny and analysis. When
we expose our fears to the light of
thoughtful examination they usually
just evaporate.
Jack Canfield
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