School days

By By Thomas Tingle
Record Managing Editor
It's hard to believe that another school year is upon us.
Where did the summer break go?
Gee, it's been a long time since I've been in school and had a summer break.
I have an uncle who teaches school in Texas and two good friends who teach here in Madison County. The other day, my wife and I and our two children were in a store that was filled with mom's filling their shopping carts with school supplies. Our children are in daycare at this time, but Austin will be going into kindergarten next year.
Watching the mom's shop for the things their little one's needed for school brought back a lot of fond memories. I looked at one of the lists and, for the most part, it was the same as what my mom had to get for my sister and I when we were in school – pencils, notebook paper, notebooks, scissors, glue, erasers, markers, etc.
Do students these days have to buy book covers, or do they use brown paper bags like I used to use and could draw all over them during the school year. Oh yeah, I forgot. Unless you ask for paper bags in the grocery store, you get plastic. So, brown paper bags being used for book covers may not be the "thing" today.
At least some things haven't changed since I was in school. During the summer, most of the schools here in Madison received a fresh coat of paint in the hallways, classrooms and restrooms. Most of the paint colors used in schools today are fun, bright and stimulating. I have no idea where the paint was purchased that was used in the hallways of the high school I attended, but they weren't colors you could find in your neighborhood paint store. They must have been reject colors – pea green, burnt orange, mustard yellow. Some of you can remember those colors of choice can't you?
I look forward to the new school year and I look forward to filling the paper full of school news. There is so much going on that it will fill several pages each week.
I would like to remind our schools that we have a Web site and I'll be posting a lot of school-oriented news on the site. If you haven't seen it, check it out at www.themadisonrecord.com. We'll be more than happy to get all of the school information in as fast as we get it.
School days, school days. Dear and golden rule days. Reading and writing and arithmetic.
Is that popular school song still sung today?