The first day is always going to be tricky. You are not sure if you are doing this thing right, if this goes here or there, are people judging what I am doing. For Principal Ball, no first day will ever compare to his first day as Etowah’s principal.

“Literally, I show up on my first day, it’s July whatever the day was, and I have a parent who is concerned with their kid’s schedule. So I call Mrs. Jones, who I had just met that day, and I said ‘Hey get me the cumulative folder for this student, let me look at the schedule and see if I can do anything about it,’” Ball said.

Little did Ball know that something terrible was brewing.

“Almost an hour goes by, and I’m not really familiar with the campus so I don’t know where she is, when she calls my office phone and asks me to come down to the counseling office. I said ‘Sure. Where is that?’ She gives me the directions and when I walk in, everyone looks like their cat or dog has died,” Ball said.

Over 300 student cumulative files had gone missing. Those files contained test scores, demographics, and important information about each student. At the time, Etowah had no procedure for bringing the files over from Booth to Etowah. They did not have a set time for when or where to file them, so when they were brought over, they were left on the desk, and all the counselors went home for the summer.

“What we do now is a team comes together and puts the files in alphabetical order in secure file cabinets. But we didn’t have that back then. So I’m walking around the whole school, asking all the custodians and nobody knows and then the head custodian goes ‘I think they came and picked those up for shredding,’” Ball said.

They did. By the time Ball had called the county office, over half of the files were destroyed.

“Half of the freshman classes’ files were lost. And to add insult to injury, as I was walking back to my office, a brick fell off the overhead walkway between the C-building and the L-building and hit me on the head,” Ball said.

Later that night he learned of a massive MRSA outbreak in the fieldhouse. MRSA is a bacterial infection that is highly contagious and breeds in dirty and smelly areas. No custodian was assigned to clean the fieldhouse, so the conditions had gotten worse and worse, especially in the heat of summer.

“I found out that two of our kids were in the hospital because the MRSA was so bad. Why was it so bad? Because no one cleaned the fieldhouse, and it had a carpeted floor. It was disgusting. Trash was everywhere, and the smell was horrifying. If I could have blown it up, like just taken a grenade to it, I would have done it,” Ball said.

So many of the changes at Etowah were a result from this horror story: the numbers on each building, the new procedure for the cumulative files, rubber and concrete flooring in the fieldhouse, and a remodeled overhead walkway. As Ball heads off to a new adventure in New York City, his first day at Etowah will always remain with him.