Until yesterday morning, when I showed up for school, I didn’t know what backflow was. It was the 100th day of school, and the kindergartener arriving with me was more than excited about the upcoming day of celebrating the number 100. Before arriving, all I knew was the school had no water. I quickly learned that someone had removed the pipes and back flow valve near our parking lot.
As I pulled into the parking lot, a few staff members were in front of the school talking with parents, many on their phones scrambling to make alternative arrangements for the day. With no water, and uncertainty about when repairs could be made, our health department regulations required us to close. I walked in the building to a team of staff, led by our office manager, already on the phone with several entities, including the City of Phoenix and the police, to remedy the situation. A couple teachers were calling parents asking them to come back and pick up their children, and other staff were in the multi supervising students who were here. It was an impressive scene to step into in the midst of a challenging situation. After awhile I had to leave for an appointment, but throughout the day there were communications going out to parents and staff with updates on the situation. By early afternoon a temporary fix was in place, with a permanent solution in the works. Good enough to have school today.
Thinking that was enough of a challenge to be solved in one week, I was equally surprised when I walked into school this morning and our power was out! Due to a neighborhood outage, we had no power for about an hour and a half. Fortunately, it was a cool day, and with our classroom windows and skylights, learning was uninterrupted. Once again, the resilient Seed staff quickly thought of pulling out the battery powered lights from our winter solstice celebration to light up the bathrooms. For the most part, the morning went along smoothly, and before we knew it, the lights were back on.
As I thought about these two incidents within a day of each other, I thought about backflow, which is an unwanted flow of water or other fluids in the wrong direction. The valve that was stolen was there to prevent backflow from occurring. This week our staff served as a backflow valve for the Seed. They minimized obstacles that arose which could have interfered significantly more with the flow of our work. Thanks to staff and parents for the diligence and understanding through a most interesting past two days.