Fun and games, but no busses

For some reason, probably because I'm my mother's child, I volunteered to go on the ninth grade class retreat as a chaperone.

No, I don't teach ninth grade. I don't moderate the ninth grade class. I don't even have a ninth grade homeroom anymore. But getting faculty to chaperone overnight trips is something of an onerous task at my school, so I raised my hand and hopped on the bus to camp Thursday morning, little knowing what lay in store.

My school admits students primarily at two grades: seventh and ninth. There's always been an issue with class unity in ninth grade between the new students and the kids who've been there since seventh grade. In previous years, the ninth graders have had an all-day retreat at a local church to try and encourage togetherness. Last year's retreat was, by all accounts, an unmitigated disaster, so the counseling department decided to try an overnight retreat this year to see if increased length of time and increased distance from school helped the kids to break out of their cliques a little more. An unforeseen benefit in the timing of this retreat was that there were several brand-new ninth graders who came this week as hurricane evacuees, so it was a nice opportunity for them to spend time with their new classmates.

Thursday morning, we put the luggage on the busses, went to Mass, then grabbed box lunches and headed up to the North Georgia mountains. The kids seemed excited; I'm not sure whether they were more excited about going to camp or missing class for two days, but they were sure loud!

We got up to camp later than we'd planned, so the staff got the kids going on their planned team-building activities right away. The staff assumed that the kids already knew each other's names, so they cut the icebreaker activity for the sake of time. Because many of them have only been at the school for two and a half weeks, they really don't know each other's names yet. The kids did have nametags, but they were pretty much destroyed by the time they got to camp. (How it's possible to destroy a stick-on nametag when all you're doing is sitting on a bus for two hours is beyond me, but it's obviously not beyond them!)

They ran around and did team-builders all afternoon, then ate dinner and had a little bit of free time before the evening concert. The guy who came out and performed was great -- the kids were all into the songs and the games and they were wound up by the end!

The chaperones were all on sleeping porches on the back of the cabins, which may not have been the best plan ever; I was nervous that we'd fall asleep and the girls would head out the front door. They didn't, but they were hopping in and out of bed so much and "whispering" (actually muted yelling) at each other so loudly that I didn't get a lot of sleep. I finally told them to get in their beds and close their eyes around 1 a.m. And 1:45 a.m. And at 2:15 a.m., I went all Wicked Witch of the West on them and said that anybody who couldn't control her mouth was going to come sleep out on the porch with me and Ms. N., the other chaperone. (She was knocked out on cold medicine at that point.) They settled down after that.

We had two more activity rotations on Friday morning, with a brief period of free time between breakfast and activities. Some of the boys used that free time to shoot off a fire extinguisher in one of their cabins, which the adults discovered before lunch. The counselors were really upset, not just that it had happened, but also that it could prejudice the administration against repeating the retreat next year.

The boys from the cabin where the incident had occurred had clean-up duty after lunch, and they were all worried that they'd be punished collectively for what had happened. They all said that they weren't involved, and then one kid came forward and said, "I did it." I was really proud of him -- it took guts to confess in front of his friends.

He wasn't the instigator; two boys from another cabin came in and were spraying the fire extinguisher and he walked in on them. They coerced him into spraying the extinguisher himself, probably so he wouldn't turn them in, although that sort of thinking may be too subtle for this age group. Anyhow, it put a blot on the end of what was otherwise a good trip.

We got the kids and their stuff up to the staging area for the busses around noon. By this point, we were down to eight faculty members because some had driven their own cars up and had already started back and some had gotten on the school's minibus with the JV volleyball players who had had to get back a little early so they could go play in an out-of-state tournament.

No busses.

They started calling the bus company and the school, and the bus company had messed up. They had scheduled busses for Saturday instead of Friday. So here we were, two hours from Atlanta, with two hundred kids and no transportation.

We needed four busses, but we could only get two each from two different companies and they had two different arrival times. I stayed with the kids in the last half of the alphabet, who were going out on the second set of busses.

The first group left around 4. We didn't leave till after six. The kids were real troopers; they sat around and talked and joked and played and generally had a good time. It may have been serendipitous...after all, nothing builds unity like adversity!

So will I be going on the Second Annual Ninth Grade Retreat next September? You bet!

But I'll take my own car. :-)