At precisely 3 p.m. today, Clarence Michiel principal Bill Gook and vice-principal Lisa Blackstock opened the school doors releasing their charges, who have just completed a 10-month sentence, onto our city streets. The last student had exited the scene in a tad under eight seconds, giving us our Great 8 Second Escape. Why can't kids show this much enthusiasm when they're asked to take out the garbage or mow the lawn?

So now they're loose . . . Thousands of them. But look on the bright side, it's only for two months. We've been promised that they'll be returned to some kind of an appropriate institution in September.

Enjoy the photos. And if one of these kids is yours, we hope you can figure out what it is he or she is throwing away so you'll have some kind of an idea what you'll need to buy in September.

Oh, and thanks to Bill and Lisa at Clarence Michiel for lending us this grade-seven class—a part of the Class of 2006—for a couple of minutes last week so we could stage this scene in advance. That's right. The truth is, we don't have a clue what really happened at Clarence Michiel at 3 p.m. today. We're certain, though, that the chaos was probably sufficient to be measured on the Richter scale. We're certain that somewhere in the world there is an actual record of the occurence of the event. But we're not about to go going looking for it.

As far as our cheating is concerned, we knew that if we tried to record the actual scene that there might be as many as 10 times the number of kids than we actually photographed in our little pre-enactment, and that thought alone terrified our camera guy into faking and cheating just to make himself look good. We feel he was justified, however, and back him 100 percent.