My dad is a computer programmer and software engineer of unusually advanced skill levels, which made him particularly well-sought-after to the government during the 80s and 90s when most people only got this kind of education through universities because the government hadn't yet given any grants or incentives to put people through the training. So for a good chunk of my life he's been employed by various government agencies and companies that do contracting work with the feds (including Lockheed Martin and Grumann Aerospace), even though he isn't himself a government employee even when the government was paying his salary. He's always been an independent contractor, which meant that even when he was working on military bases the government didn't provide us a place to live. So my parents have always had to find housing within commuting distance of whatever military base he was working on, and not always conveniently closeby because the areas immediately around bases have notoriously high cost of living. He worked for the US Air Force the entire time we lived in Yorkshire into the mid-90s, but we lived in a civilian neighbourhood. When his contract with Lockheed expired, we moved back to the states and my dad got a job that again had a lot of contacts with the government without being entitled to the benefits of actually being a government employee.
The area they ultimately settled was a relatively inexpensive choice at the time, and the reason for this was because it was mostly rural then. It's still pretty undeveloped outside of the widely-spaced pockets of suburbia and you don't have to drive far to see farmland. But at the time it was just about the edge of the known universe, an untamed winderness on par with the Australian Outback or the Sahara, which was why we could afford to live there. Today it's one of the most painfully non-urban places to live--basic cost of living is estimated to be around $75,000 a year, more than twice the national average minimum wage and over four times as high as two full-time minimum wage employees can earn. It was just starting to undergo a boom when we moved there so every year the schools got more and more crowded as they struggled to accommodate more and more children than they had initially been built for.
By the time I left my elementary school, it had about 850 or 900 children attending it, in a building never built for more than 700, so it's putting it pretty lightly to say it was a tight squeeze. Every available space was converted to classroom space and there were at least a dozen portable trailers around the perimeter that were all being used. They just stuck the things wherever they could find space with access to a door, so they took up huge portions of what were initially playgrounds, soccer pitches, and baseball fields. Kids outside for gym and recess could pull faces at the windows and rap the sides of the trailers, which became a huge distraction and carried big penalties.
This story has a point, I swear.
Anyway, so there were way too many kids and not nearly enough room for all of them and the classes relegated to the portables usually supplemented class time with outdoor lessons, not least because the trailers were little more than airless metal boxes that got unbearably hot and stuffy in spring and summer. Anything that could be moved outdoors usually was, which was where a lot of science experiments ended up.
Fourth grade science classes included a study of mold (ew!) that invited hands-on experiments that couldn't be done indoors because mold quickly gross smelly as well as toxic; the teachers in the portable classrooms would douse popular kinds of bread with water and leave them outside under a covering so they would grow mold and the students could observe the animation of food in real time.
These two stories coincide one very worrisome day.
A group of kindergarten students had escaped supervision for a short time one spring and wandered into the forbidden forest of portables to commit illegal acts of distraction and came upon the science experiment. Being young and therefore stupid, they didn't know what it was. Nobody knows which students did it or when, but when the science class went to check on their moldy bread they discovered it missing. Teachers put the pieces together and realized--to their horror--that some small child or children had actually eaten them, mold and all.
Shockingly, nobody came down with a telltale sign of food poisoning to point to the culprits and nobody ever found out who was responsible for the lapse of adult supervision. But whoever mistook mold for a tasty snack, they probably had enough bread mold in their systems to fight every case of syphilis on the eastern seaboard.
Which actually makes me heave a little bit just thinking about it.
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