We all hope it will happen. That we will not wake up on Monday morning to the sunshine, but the flash of a lighting strike. Thunder will rumble over us, and the flooded streets will make it impossible to leave our homes. We will turn on our TVs to discover that school has been canceled.

This fantasy that has been playing in the heads of students and teachers throughout this past week is becoming more and more unrealistic. Tropical Storm Erika has been downgraded to a Tropical Depression. Depressingly enough, this means that the mundane school day will continue on as normal, just a little more rainy.

The proactive bunch who were swarming to supply stores this week can now rest a little more easily. But what do they do with a year’s worth of non-perishable foods that they stocked up on? Many stores look like a war-zone, lacking bottled water, batteries and flashlights.

This comes with little consolation for students on this painfully sunny day. Many of them relied on the “no school” rumor for the past week and are disappointed to see it proven wrong. It surely does say a lot about students, though, wishing for a possibly devastating storm to rip through South Florida, all for an extra day off of school. Islands such as Haiti have experienced the wrath of Erika. People have died due to the brutal weather.

Floridians understand the horror a storm can cause. Hurricane Katrina and Andrew are two of the incredibly destructive forces of nature that Florida has seen. Students are praying for Erika, a storm that has taken lives, to lash out. Erika has developed during the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, people should be praying for the lives that were lost, not for more devastation. They want this storm to be serious enough that tri-rail cannot operate safely and buses are forbidden to move. While I admit, I have been silently praying to the weather gods this week as well, is school that difficult, that mundane, that awful, that we would rather have a deathly storm rip through our neighborhoods?