Chapter 512: Funding Learning And Giving Back

“David,” the principal said after the other parents left. “A moment of your time?”

Why do I feel like a kid getting called into the principal’s office without knowing what I did to get in trouble?

“Given what I’ve learned of your time here over the last few years, you were lucky you didn’t find yourself in my office regularly,” the middle school principal said and laughed. “I observed you mostly ignoring the students and teachers around you. I know that if your mother heard you were rude, offensive, or acted like anything other than a gentleman, you were in a lot of trouble. Your grades were excellent, so we overlooked when you went out of your way to comfort other students who needed someone to sit with them or hold them as they cried. It seems that many girls came to get comfort from you during recess, with some ending up pregnant as a result. However, that isn’t what I wanted to discuss.”

We were interrupted by a kid screaming and yelling at the front of the office. I barely got around the counter when I had a girl trying to climb up my body. I picked her up, and almost instantly, the girl calmed down. Before we could find out what was going on, she fell asleep. I sat her in one of the padded armchairs, but as soon as I stepped back, she was awake and screaming again.

Yeah. I’ve been here and done this!

“We aren’t going to get her to tell us anything until she wakes up on her own. Could we use the conference room so everyone can see I’m only holding her? It would be easier on everyone’s ears, too,” I asked.

“I guess your ignoring everyone wasn’t why the Autistic and special-needs kids stopped having a meltdown when you pulled them into your arms.” One of the women in the office said, “The last time I saw a girl like her rush at you, she knocked you flat on your back. Something set this girl off, and no one knows what happened.”

I sat in the conference room to wait for the principal to tell me what he wanted to discuss. The girl’s hair was a mess, and I worked out the tangles with my fingers.

“Now, where were we?” the principal asked. “Your selflessness always impressed me, David, not just back when you were in eighth grade. That was above and beyond anything I’ve ever seen. It disgusted me when I learned how the school board treated you like the assailant, not the victim, in that incident at the high school. Everyone knew you were smart, David. I’m amazed at your creative way of trying to solve their adamant requirements that you attend school.”

We were interrupted by a frantic father holding a hairbrush. He stopped short when she saw his daughter in my lap with my fingers working their magic in her hair. She had woken up at some point and sat back slightly. When I finished, the girl squirmed around a bit. She noticed my dick sat aimed down the left leg of my pants. It is why she moved around to sitting only on my left leg. The heat radiating from her crotch cleared up any question of her repositioning. My dick head was where it would be nestled between her pussy lips if we were naked, and she was at least sixteen, not fourteen.

A bit of grinding her clit against my dick got her what she needed, and she was back to sleep with her head on my chest.

“What have you done with my daughter? That girl looks like her and is wearing the clothes she had on when she left, but there is no way she is my daughter,” he said.

The principal went over to the father and said, “This is David Jones. For the entire time that he went to school here, if there was a kid that needed someone to hold them, they found David. He was in my office when your daughter started screaming her head off. As soon as she saw David, she started trying to climb up his body. Once she had her arms and legs around him, she went to sleep.”

“Autistic and touch-averse people say I don’t make their skin crawl when I touch them. I’m guessing by the look of that hairbrush that it is the only one she will use to brush her hair?” I asked.

He took a few seconds to process what I said and answered, “It seems you know her already. She couldn’t find it last night after her shower and spent the rest of the night tearing the house apart. It sat on her dresser where she threw it yesterday morning when it wasn’t making her hair do what she wanted. Do you babysit?”

That made me burst out laughing. People in the office came in to see what was so funny.

“You could say that,” I was finally able to answer. “I own four foster care self-contained mini-cities where my thousands of foster children live. I have a twelve-year-old daughter I adopted. Then you have my adopted sister, Rosie, whom I had to bring to school today to face the music for her behavior yesterday. I also have a four-year-old daughter that my parents adopted when I was fifteen.”

Before he could reply, the girl asked, “Daddy, can you get me permission to leave school early? I need my haircut, some new underwear, and I want to start wearing skirts and dresses, not pants. Will you get me more of the razor blades you use to shave? I want to start shaving my legs. Girls have been making fun of me. They said my hair looked like the girl yesterday with poop toilet paper glued in her hair. I tried, but I couldn’t stop the meltdown. I’m glad this man was here. I don’t know what it is about him, but I wanted him to hold me.”

“Dee has gym right now. Can someone ask her to come to the office with her bathroom bag once she gets dressed?” I asked the office staff.

It wasn’t long before Dee entered the office with her gym bag. She hadn’t met the girl I had been holding, but I could feel that they formed an almost instant bond.

Dee hates her social studies class because she knows more about their studying places than her teacher. She won’t mind skipping class.

I asked the principal, “Can Dee skip her social studies class to go take this girl off somewhere for fifteen to twenty minutes?”

If anyone else asked, you would tell them to pound sand.

The office staff called to tell her social studies teacher that Dee was helping with something in the office.

Dee surprised the girl when she took the girl’s hand and pulled the girl off my lap. They were still holding hands as they hurried toward the gym. I knew Dee’s tits were only a bit bigger than the girl’s. Dee also had on a cute dress and wore the same size panties. The girl was wearing a dress two sizes too small.

The girl’s dad had to take an important phone call.

“Interruptions, they go with the job,” the principal said. “Now, back to business. The county school system is still trying to recover from what the school board did before your run-in. Administrators do their best to stretch what money there is to do the bare minimum to keep the lights on. We haven’t gotten any new textbooks since you went here, and the ones we have are falling apart. They are online, but there is no money to buy devices for the students. Maybe ten percent of the kids have something they can bring from home, but the rest have to take turns using the two ancient desktops in each classroom. I was looking for options and found that you have a company that refurbishes used tablets and laptops. I know they aren’t top of the line, but I wanted to see if we could work out a deal to make the little money we have for tech go as far as possible. We could use some new whiteboards and a case of projector bulbs if you feel generous.”

I shook my head when I got the text.

I stuck my head out to tell the office staff that they needed to arrange for the kids to eat lunch in their classrooms. The cafeteria was getting taken over. I heard the sound of truck air brakes right before a truck started beeping as it backed up toward the back door of the cafeteria. Two county maintenance trucks pulled up and started unloading their tools.

“Which classrooms are empty right now? Someone brought you presents,” the woman said. “Not sure how they expect the four of us to get all this done today, but the boss said we would have a lot of skilled labor arriving shortly.”

I didn’t say a thing as I saw the buses driving by. They were from my foster care complex with kids learning electrical, plumbing, and general contracting skills.

The father of the girl I held earlier asked what was going on.

“I did say I had thousands of foster kids, right? Well, around a hundred of them are learning various trades building houses. I quit trying to find out how someone knows what I would ask to do and get started right as I asked someone to do it. Given those busses’ capacity, I would guess most of them are waiting out front for permission to enter the school,” I told him.

I asked the principal, “Can my kids come in to help do the fastest school renovation in the county’s history without being too disruptive?”

“Before I do something likely to get me fired, what are we talking about here?” the principal asked.

A pretty sixteen-year-old girl in clean white coveralls said, “According to the blueprints, we will install a ready-made, handicap accessible platform to raise the floor by two inches. With the ten-foot ceilings, it won’t be all that noticeable. Given the school’s ancient wiring, the space will provide the required space for the wiring. The current desks are being replaced with smart desks containing built-in full-color e-ink displays. The students will use a stylus that looks like a common cheap ballpoint pen, but with a stylus tip, to write on the screens as if they were writing on paper. Should they forget and use a ballpoint pen, marker, pencil, or whatever, it will also register, but they will soon find the graphite and ink on their skin and clothes. It will not adhere to the screen surface. Students will also get a portable, colored e-ink reader to replace their textbooks. Android, i-Fruit, and MicroSloth tablets are not optimum for this age range. Kids in puberty are clumsy and curious. These devices remove any liability on the schools for children accessing inappropriate material on the Internet.”

A boy came in to hand her one.

“These are not indestructible but were designed to handle the harsh conditions of deserts, arctic regions, rain forests, and kids throwing them around. They also exceed the military specifications for durability,” she told us as she handed one to the principal. “You can review the proposed plan, but if we wish to complete the rooms currently unoccupied, I will need your signature of approval.”

He signed, and she called in the troops. We watched as my foster kids worked together to remove the student desks and use various tools to relocate the remaining furniture in the room. They did it as quietly as possible, with less noise than the kids make with the desks after the bell.

A line of kids carrying the old desks headed out to wherever the desks were going. Simultaneously, the kids began carting in spools of wire. I looked in one room to see a kid wrapping electrical tape around one of the strings they used to pull wires inside a conduit.

I don’t know what they used to drill the holes for the power conduits, but I didn’t hear it.

While the electricians tied in the new fuse boxes and wired them up, the kids assembled the new floor sections and then carried in the new desks. The surprise was them removing the whiteboards. In their place, they installed LCD screens that locked into each other like LEGO blocks. Once mounted and secured, they mounted up a thin piece of bullet and scratch-proof glass. A tiny strip around the sides and top snapped into spots on the LCD screens. All four rooms were being done simultaneously with military-like precision.

These rooms got delayed due to running new wiring from the transformers to the new fuse boxes. What the school plans showed as being up to code on the wiring wasn’t. We had a two-minute power outage in this section when they completed cutting in the new wiring to replace the old.

“It is sad to find that we were required to have a contingency plan for the previous electrical contractor’s shoddy workmanship and that contractor’s use of a lower gauge wiring than specified. They also used aluminum, instead of copper, in places where inspectors would not see it. The children who would have returned to these classrooms were re-directed to the cafeteria to get their color e-reader,” a boy told us. “That provides us with the short time required for the full systems check.”

Once the power was turned on, the new LCD screens came on to show a test pattern. One of the foster kids clicked through the remote to validate that all was as expected.

I was surprised when a little kid hugged me as a group of kids with Autism, Down’s Syndrome, and mental health challenges rushed into the room with a handful of new whiteboard markers. They each had a specific section of the LCD whiteboard to test out. What first looked like random squiggles began turning into a picture. Each kid on the board had a part of the room’s class picture. In about ten minutes, the kids had drawn in how they saw their section of the class photograph. Some were as close to being an exact copy as you can get with whiteboard markers. Others tended toward stick figures, but they had enough detail that you could tell which kid was which. The rest varied somewhere in between.

Some older kids guided the artists from the room to wait for the next classroom when it was ready.

One of the Down’s Syndrome kids summed it up well when they said happily, “That one works, Daddy.”

Everything was completed and cleaned up. All my foster kids were off doing another set of classrooms when the kids from these classrooms started returning with their new color e-readers. I didn’t see them do it, but someone had shut off the digital whiteboard and cleaned the glass.

The kids were excitedly talking about the newly renovated classroom when a girl, who I guess to be ten or eleven, walked into this classroom. It seems that Molly isn’t the only Autistic kid to get her point across without saying a word. She didn’t need to. Her shrill whistle claimed all the kid’s attention. She held one of the e-ink devices like those installed on each desk.

Holding a stylus, she made a checkmark on the screen. She then used a crayon, pencil, pen, and marker to make a circle with a line. Taking a white piece of a dress shirt, she pushed it against part of the screen. Pulling it away showed that where she pressed it transferred to the shirt, and that section of the screen was now clean. Using a latex glove, she put her hand on the device. All the stuff under where she touched was now on the glove.

Before leaving the room, she put on nitrile gloves, picked up a container of cleaning wipes, took a sealed pack of three styluses, wiped them off, and then put them on the desk of a specific student. She repeated this until each desk had a bag of styluses, even when a child was absent.

She went to the teacher, held up the remote, and turned on the digital whiteboard. It first came up with a diagram of the room. Each student had their picture in the spot where they were assigned. Two were twins who had swapped seats beside the boys they liked. The Autistic girl stood there glaring at the two girls until they got the point and went to their correct seats.

Going to the whiteboard, she touched one of the pictures. Their image disappeared, and a math problem appeared on the screen. That kid was absent, so the girl went to their desk and worked out the math problem. When she tapped the button to say she had finished, what she wrote appeared on the whiteboard. She had solved it incorrectly, which some kids in the room noticed. The girl then went to the teacher’s desk to pick up a marker and corrected the problem. The e-ink desks showed her original wrong answer and then the correct one, just as it did on the whiteboard.