Imagine you sent your only child eight thousand miles away to go to school in Chicago. Not a suburb, but Chicago, the murder capital of America with shootings heard around the world.
You trust your child at a faith based school, spending as much as $40,000 a year to live and study there.
And this is the only thing that separates your child from the headlines.
This door has been an object of contention between myself and uh, my former employer. I am once again homeless, this time due to my plight to stick up for a group of international students studying at a faith based school in Chicago.
While the doors to the school building are modern and of top quality, the door to the boy’s dorm is uh, let’s say, a hooptie.
When I took the position in August, the latch on the side of the door was loose, the screws hanging out. The school assured me and my husband, the matter would be taken care of.
I had envisioned a door similar in quality to what is standard at dorms housing students, particularly those housing minors. I thought the school would invest $800 in a door with a self locking mechanism, possibly a fob for a key-less entry, or one that was at least up to par with all of the other door locks in the neighborhood.
After all, this is Chicago, not the Little House on the Prairie.
Well, after a month of complaining, emails and “We’ll Get To It” responses, the door knob is still loose, the door found open, and keys routinely get stuck inside, which was extremely embarrassing in when it happened in front of parents who flew in from the flip-side to check up on their son.
But the school admin assures me that “proper training of these students will keep the dorm safe”.
I am not sure this is the time or neighborhood to check a teen’s responsibility. But hey, it’s a Christian school and Jesus will send an angel to save them.
Try explaining that to atheist students.
Meanwhile, the adjacent school doors (with no students sleeping behind them), have fumble free, state of the art locks like this.
But now, I am out the door .
Both the crappy and the nice one.