My ONE politically-oriented post

I'm just trying to stay out of the way.

Obama is coming to our small city this afternoon, and the school is in a delirium of "can I call my mom to see if I can leave school to see Obama?" Finally an announcement was made that NO ONE is allowed to use the phone in the attendance office to call for permission to leave the school (which leaves it wide open for school-wide use of forbidden cell phones and sudden illnesses).

The announcement of the visit was made on Sunday, and the town has been nuts since then. I believe that the last presidential candidate visited here in 1860. People camped overnight on the JMU campus, hoping to get inside the Convocation Center and claim one of the 8000 seats. This will be interesting; let's see, there are at least 10,000 JMU students, about 40,000 city residents, and a few hundred city school teachers and students all vying for a glimpse.

I'm going down to the attendance office to see how insane it all is. I bet that half of the kids in the school are trying to leave.

UPDATE: That was interesting. Many students decided that they had the right to leave school without parental permission because a presidential candidate is speaking nearby. Mayhem ensued. Many of the students became quite verbally abusive to staff and administration. An announcement was made that no more students would be allowed to leave school for any reason other than illness (and suddenly many kids were ill) and no calls from parents would be entertained in that regard. Some parents stormed in and were also verbally abusive to staff and administration as a result of this.

Last I heard, at least half of our 1300+ kids had signed out or stayed out all day. At noon, it was said that there was a line of potential attendees snaking out a mile from the Convo Center. It's 46 degrees and windy. I just heard that people are parking at K-Mart, which is a good two miles away, and having to walk from there.