schools, the buildings
Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet,
Acts, Chapter 7, Verse 48
Nobody really owns a school, but it’s a rare janny who doesn’t think that they own theirs. It’s inevitable I suppose, we do all of the things that give humans a sense of ownership over a thing — we spend a good deal of our lives in it, we open and close it, we keep it clean, heated, we fix the things that are broken, we try to keep bad people out. We take pride in its history, in the achievements of its pupils; most of us wouldn’t go as far as Mike did — he called the school she
(he was ex-navy, he saw it as a ship) and expected you to be loyal to it. I felt he often confused this loyalty to the school with a loyalty to him. Still most of us would refer to it as my
school, the my being the my we use when we own something.
Certainly I’ve thought that I’ve owned a few schools in my time. Some years ago I counted up the schools that I’d worked in (primaries, secondaries, special schools and community centres), it was somewhere in the forties.