Joy Ride

A few weeks ago I heard about an accident that happened on campus. I held off writing about it until I knew all of the details…

As you may know, my high school is a technical school. The kids can choose one of two streams of study (cars or computers) and live on campus in school dorms throughout the year. This can have both positive and negative consequences.

On the plus side, they have the opportunity to work on their school projects around the clock. It’s not uncommon for groups of students to work on their engines or computers well into the night, so the school must grant them a certain degree of trust with their equipment.

This brings me to the negative side… How easily the trust can be abused.

Late at night a few weeks ago, one of the students thought it would be a fun idea to take the school’s “shop car” out for a test drive around the school. Without even a driver’s license, he “borrowed” the car and drove around the campus and surrounding area (probably to the cheers of his classmates). Needless to say, things didn’t end very well.

The details aren’t exactly clear, but somehow he managed to smash into the brick flower garden, flip the car over, and land in the teacher’s parking lot. Amazingly, he crawled out of the overturned car without any major injuries.

Because of the HIGHLY illegal nature of the event, and the fact that it happened on school property, the police were not involved. Instead, the Principal called in a crew (tow truck?) to flip the car back over to store it behind the school. The student could’ve easily been expelled for this, but the Principal decided against it for two reasons:

Firstly, the student has one of the highest grades in the school. Expelling him would’ve completely destroyed his career.

Secondly, the winter months were unforgiving on our dirt schoolyard and the entire thing needed to be leveled. Luckily for the Principal, he now had a new slave…

- Ken