Who Let the Dogs Out?

So today was a pretty exciting day at work. It started out normally enough. I sat down in the teachers' lounge for my first hour prep period to begin working on a reading comprehension exercise for my English I class. About 20 minutes into the period, a voice comes over the school intercom announcing that the school was now on lockdown.

Yeah, lockdown.

For those of you not in the education game, what that means is that the dogs were on the way -- the drug dogs!

About once a year, the local police show up with a K-9 unit that sniffs its way through the school in a search for drugs. During this time, students are not permitted to leave the classroom while the dogs go up and down the hall sniffing lockers. Every other year this has happened, I've been in my classroom with students. Since it was my prep period, I was expected to assist in this whole thing. Within a couple minutes of the announcement, the police walked in with their dogs -- big, scary looking things (although they actually seemed quite sweet when they weren't on the hunt for drugs). I followed quietly along behind a police officer and his dog as the dog frantically sniffed his way down the hall where my classroom is. When a suspicious smell was discovered, the dog would just sit down. They don't bark! The police officer would then urge the dog up and take him down the row again (sometimes a couple times) to see if he would sit each time. If he didn't sit every time, another dog would be brought through to see if that dog sat. Once a locker was confirmed as suspect, a plastic tie was put through the lock so that it was not openable as well as through the locks of the locker on either side of the suspect locker. We had a book that listed every student and his/her locker number, so when a locker was "tagged" we would look up who used that locker. After the dogs were finished, the teachers were sent to round up the students with tagged lockers and bring them to the auditorium where they waited until they were taken individually to their lockers to submit to a search. I witnessed several locker searches and is it bad to say I was a little disappointed that nothing was found? I guess I wanted a little more excitement for this story (because as soon as the lockdown announcement was made, my first thought was, "Oh, good! Something to blog about!!")

While the lockers were being searched, the dogs moved out to the parking lot and sniffed cars. That led to the creation of yet another list of students whose cars had been "tagged." I was sent to fetch yet another student who I then accompanied out to the parking lot where her truck was about to be searched -- a truck belonging to her parents, frequently driven by her older brother -- an older brother she informed the police smokes pot. A search of her car produced a seed. To the best of my knowledge, that's all that was found. All I know for sure is that she did not return to her classes and her truck was towed from the parking lot later this morning.

As far as I know, this search turned up just that one seed. After over an hour of "lockdown" and five dogs and countless officers off the streets, the only discovery was a lone seed. No meth, no pills, no buds. Just a seed.

I think I'm just going to leave the story at that.

The whole thing reminded me of this skit from SNL this past weekend. So I'll actually just leave the story at that.