2026 Stories Out of School

Stories Out of School is an annual flash-fiction contest created by the Academy for Teachers to honor "the most fascinating, difficult, and important job on the planet." We are delighted to partner with them to share the prizewinning story as well as the work of the three finalists, selected by this year’s judge, Paul Tremblay: Rob Earle, Jocelyn Meermans, and Pete Gambino. The winning story, “ The Lesson Plan,” will also appear in A Public Space No. 33. Congratulations to all.

The Lesson Plan by Rhoda Olkin

I have been in a private high school classroom for thirty years, and this story pushes all my buttons. As wonderful and worthy a profession as teaching is, there’s something strange (if you allow yourself to dwell on it) and unmooring about being responsible for a room full of other people’s children. There’s also the ever-present teacherly fear that I am not doing a good job, that maybe the students suspect I’m going through the motions, and maybe they know more and know better than I do; more precisely, they know that I cannot keep them safe from wider and smaller worlds. It’s a healthy set of fears rooted in empathy, fears I hope I will never lose. Without being didactic, the author lays out those fears and more within a mysterious set of lesson plans left by a mysterious student. It’s a brilliant story that gives me a chill, even on multiple rereads. At the same time, the story gives me a measure of comfort because there’s another educator who feels like I do, too. —Paul Tremblay

The first sheet looked ordinary enough, Monday’s lesson for the Freshmen. Neatly typed, 12-point Arial. Learning objectives, activities, homework. But halfway down the page, a line I’d never written: “Ensure all blinds can be drawn quickly and fully.” I assumed it was left over from a past teacher. New term, new classroom, always a few stray pagers in the desk drawers. I moved on.

Tuesday’s plan was stranger. Under Vocab Quiz, someone had inserted: “Remind students not to respond to knocks on the windows, no matter how polite.” The font matched. The wording didn’t.

By Wednesday, I was looking for it. Found the day’s plan slipped between my printouts. The usual: Take attendance, discuss homework, review Chapter 6. Then, in bold this time: “Teach students to recognize the difference between normal wind and the whispering wind.” I stared at it so long I almost missed the bell.

Thursday’s page was already on my desk when I arrived. No English objectives this time. “Drill: Students must get under their desks within 6 seconds of the sky turning red.” I crumped it and tossed it in the bin. We read poetry instead. That afternoon, one of my quieter boys, Jamie, lingered after class.

“We didn’t practice the thing,” he said. “What thing?”

“The under-desk thing. For the red.” He said it like we’d discussed it before. I told him to go eat his lunch.

Friday’s plan was under my coffee mug. “Students should be able to stay absolutely still for fifteen minutes without speaking. Do not tell them why.” Faint pencil marks in the bottom corner read, “nearly ready.”

Over the weekend, I dreamed of a shadow moving across the ocean. Limitless, ancient, colossal.

On Monday, there were two pages. The first read, “Review all previous drills. No deviations.” The second was a list of my students’ names. Every name had a symbol beside it, a wave, a cloud, a spiral. All except for Jamie. He was absent that day.

Tuesday morning, the halls were unnervingly quiet. I unlocked my classroom.

One sheet waited in the center of my desk. “Do not open the windows, do not answer the voices, do not make a noise when the sky turns red. Lock the door and stay very, very still.”

I crossed to the windows. Outside, the playground was empty. Past the fence, on the horizon, the bare edges of red clawed across the blue sky like a sunrise that refused to fade. Too dark for the morning, yet somehow lit from beneath, as if something vast had surfaced between the clouds and the sun.

I closed the windows, lowered the blinds all the way, twisting to make sure the light did not come in. Behind me, students were already sliding into their desks for the day’s lesson. As I shut the door to the hall, the first low, shuddering knock came from the glass.

Thirty terrified faces met my gaze as I raised a single finger to my lips.

Rhoda Olkin’s stories have appeared in The Sun, William and Mary Review, and elsewhere. She is a distinguished professor of psychology at Alliant International University, where she trains clinical psychologists.

Jesús and Mateo by Rob Earle

The second day that Jesús and Mateo were missing from class, I started to worry.

I hadn’t thought much about it Monday when they didn’t show up for Algebra.

Neither one missed class very often, although it was strange they were both absent on the same day. One could tell me where the other one was, whether sick or at some family thing. During my planning period, I checked in on Pathway, then stopped by the attendance office. Janice there told me neither one had shownup for the first or second hour, either.

Jesús was the outgoing and funny one. He made puns based on his name. He was friendly and easy to talk to, even when I had to get him to shut up and focus.

Mateo was quiet. Some people saw him as Jesús’s sidekick, but he was his own person. He tended to do better— sometimes much better—than Jesús academically. He smiled often, especially at Jesús’s antics, but rarely laughed out loud.

On Wednesday, they were both absent again. I could send them a message through school email,but students were notoriously bad at responding to those. I gave it a try anyway: “Just checking in. Please let me know if you’re going to miss much more class.” I popped my head into the vice principal’s office during lunch.

“Al, anything you can tell me about Jesús S and Mateo F ? It’s not like them to miss a lot of class, especially together.”

Al looked at me curiously. “Weird,” he said. “These aren’t the first students someone’s come to me about. I’ll look into it.”

Before heading home, I looked at the table Jesús and Mateo shared and got a little sad. I remembered when they had an Uno game going there with Chloe and Kelsi—who sat at the table behind them—before class one day. I’d had to ask them to turn around and pay attention several times after class started. Now I found the empty table a little frightening.

In the teachers’ lounge the next day, I asked my colleague Vanessa if she knew anything about Jesús and Mateo.

“This is happening a lot with the immigrant kids,” she said. “They either stop up showing up because they’re afraid, or maybe they’ve already been snatched.”

“Kids are disappearing from this school?” I asked. “Kids are disappearing from all the schools.”

By Friday, there was still no sign of Jesús, Mateo, or about a half dozen other students. Al stopped mein the hall. “We’ve tried calling them all at home—no answers, straight to voicemail. No responses on email either,” he said.

On Friday, Kelsi raised her hand before I got started. “If Jesús and Mateo aren’t coming back, can I move up to their table?”

I looked again at the empty seats for a moment. “Not just yet,” I said.“Let’s wait for a little longer.”

Rob Earle writes short stories, essays, and poetry. A teacher at Seattle Maritime Academy, he is also a two-time winner of the Northwest Seaport “Stories of the Sea” contest.

The Hail Storm by Jocelyn Meermans

Ping. Ping ping ping. Big. Fat. Drops.

“Fuck.” Mark sighed, louder than intended. “I hope you brought umbrellas.” “Mr. Speeds, can we go?”

Spidlak, pronounced speed-lack. Speeds was one of the nicknames Mark didn’t mind. Sputnik. Spitlick. Speedwack. He looked at the clock. “There’s twelve minutes.”

“But it’s raining.” “So?”

Hail slammed against the windows, like quarters from a slot machine. Lightning.

A snap. A collective gasp. “Mr. Speeds!”

“I see. Get away from the window.” “Water’s getting in.”

Another flash. Thunder. More slot machine. Dark. This wasn’t something Mark trained for. Fire drills, sure. Shooter drills, recently. But hail storms?

“It’s just a power outage,” Mark said. “It happens all the time.” “No it doesn’t,” someone shouted. “Shit’s fucked up.” Laughter.

*

“Climate change!” “Global warming!” Howls.

“Alright. Get in the hallway. Use your phones.” Zippers. Shuffles. Flash, flash, flash.

Mark waited, circled the room. “Everyone out?” he yelled, before locking the door.

“Clear the halls. Move to the gym. Clear the halls.”

“Foley’s got her megaphone.” Mark felt a nudge. “Huh?”

“You know she’s been dying to use that.” It was Ms. Tyne, the English teacher. “Put twelvehundred kids in a gym with crappy backup lights.” She paused. “What could go wrong?”

They joined the exodus toward the gym, moving slowly, more from mass than darkness. It waslike a packed subway when the balance is so out of sync, the crowd moves on its own. Each person a part of the same aggravated animal.

In the bleachers, chaotic energy. A phone in every hand. Flashes facing inward for the documentarians, the recorders, the wannabes. Flashes facing outward for everyone else, the people who just wanted to see.

“Mr. Speeds, can we go?” It was Kevin Taylor. “I don’t think so.”

“My mom’s texting.”

“Tell her you can’t leave.” Mark paused. “They’ll let us out soon.”

*

“Let us out? Like we’re locked in?” “Just go to the bleachers.”

“Nah.” Kevin extended his phone, pressed record, spun into the crowd. “We’re locked inside, y'all. This is crazy!” A celebrity in his own mind.

“What’s wrong with these kids?” Ms. Tyne said. “They think they run the world.” “Titans.” Mark laughed.He leaned on the wall, pressed against the vinyl panels.

Everyone alone and together at the same time. The jocks with the geeks, the goths, and the tough guys. It was the perfect environment for a fight, but the weirdness made violence off limits.

As fast as it started, it ended. The lights turned on and everyone froze like burglars mid-heist. A clank. A whirr. The ventilation system. A collective shuffle toward the exit. In the parking lot: dented hoods, pockmarked windshields. A mass awakening from a shared hallucination. A fever dream. One engine started. Then two. Then ten. Mark waited in his car, scanned the radio for news of the storm. Taylor Swift. Amattress sale. Commercials, commercials, commercials. In his mirror, the custodian righted an overturned garbage can. Proof, or evidence at least, of its existence.

Jocelyn Meermans’s short stories have appeared in The Literateur and Etchings. She holds an MA in English with a writing concentration from Fordham University, and works as a high school teacher.

Unplugged by Pete Gambino

write about ambission in mickbeth, the submission still read at the top. make it sound like a sophmore did it.

He had taught literature at a prestigious high school for forty-two years. Forty-two.

Plucked from an inspiring film, or better, the universe where Oreos remained full size and jeans were still cut properly, he was the instructor teens prayed all summer to find listed on their schedule. He was the one they’d fondly recall years after graduation—though maybe not by name—at an office happy hour once too much whiskey got them reminiscing. And when they recognized a verse from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the otherwise bullshit series they were binging, they remembered him.

On Mondays, he used to distribute grammar worksheets he had handwritten in cursive and then photocopied. What’s the difference between effect and affect? it looped.

Tuesdays, he’d group the class and feed it poems. Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. Discuss what Plath might mean.

Wednesdays, were for Vocabulary. Define sagacity. Provide two synonyms and two antonyms.

Thursdays, he’d perch atop his desk and read from books cracked open so many times they were held together with rubber bands. During Dracula he wore capes and did voices. He wept at the end of A Farewell to Arms. He rearranged desks into Maycomb’s courthouse and appointed the nerdiest kid in class Judge.

*

Some Fridays, he’d bring donuts. Others nothing but time to journal.

But that routine, his tenacious soldering of neurons, had since been painted over like the cigarette stains in the faculty lounge. Today, put the headphones away, stow your devices, look and speak to each other—please! were the rigors he presented after the bell.

write about ambission in mickbeth was what he got in return.

Yeah. Okay. Sure. It was easier to pretend he hadn’t seen the cheater’s prompt than it would be to argue with naïve and defensive parents. These adults represented the last of the unplugged, true, but he understood the world was rife with dramatic irony.

So he opened a new tab and booted an app his Administration touted as critical—you know, for navigating thered-tape they had concocted in the first place like double, double, toil and trouble. He typed, Apply the State of New Jersey Reading and Writing Standards to the following student response and provide feedback. Make it sound like a teacher wrote it.

Copy. Paste. Enter.

Then he sat back and watched words pulse as if cut from deep within the trusting Duncan’s veins. After all,what had ambition gotten Macbeth but stepp’d in blood? At least the teacher had earned a few minutes to himself.

Still, he spent them wondering how much longer a difference between ambission and ambition would exist at all.He knew the answer he’d have offered long ago, but now, he didn’t know what to say or if it would even matter.

Pete Gambino is a writer, playwright, filmmaker, and educator. His work has been published in Gigantic Sequins, Castle Jackal, and is soon to appear in Kinsman Quarterly. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University and teaches theater and dramatic arts at Cherry Hill East High School, where he has directed and produced over fifty plays including five of his own.