Rant Du Jour

Today's rant du jour is brought to you by the public school systems in our county and this morning's "late start for professional development," requiring me to work from home and lose at least one hour of productivity. The district my children attend is the best in our state, which is good. So perhaps I shouldn't complain. But.

In general, it really chaps my butt that they are still operating as thought it were the 1980s. They're at least 20-30 years behind today's American family. Meaning, more than half of American families have two wage-earners, mine included. Which means that when they just decide to start late for "records" or have no school at all during bank holidays or random Mondays for development, let alone the two week breaks students get thrown in with almost three months off in the summer, it's phenomenally inconvenient and expensive to scramble to find childcare in order to keep your job.

I am lucky. 100% of the employees in my team are virtual. I'm the only one that goes to a local office, so no one bats and eyelash when I just work from home. My husband also earns enough money that, although we take a significant hit, we could still pay our mortgage if I weren't working for whatever reason - at least for a few months until I found something else. But for Pete's sake - if I were working hourly for minimum wage, it seems like dealing with this crap would be almost insurmountable.

No, school is not a substitute for childcare. But, just like any business, wouldn't you imagine that the expectation would be a consistent schedule and standard business hours? From the parent's perspective, your options in the current system are:

1. Find childcare. This could be extremely expensive if you have no immediate family nearby or some other adult or older sibling willing and able to pitch in.

2. Take the random days off, be deemed unreliable and lose your job, putting your household at risk. If you're lucky you have an understanding work place or someone who will swap shifts with you, but you still may carry a stigma of unreliability OR if you get those days off, you're out the money for those hours, which isn't good if you're living paycheck to paycheck.

3. Be considered a neglectful parent by leaving your kid to their own devices during the day while you go to work.

4. Drop them off somewhere free (library, mall, cheap museum, other) to mill around aimlessly. See option 3.

From a kid's perspective, it's awesome that I occasionally get to sleep late or just mill around the house or somewhere else, but during the summer I'm losing at least two and a half months of school, falling out of practice with newfound academic skills and have to then regain lost ground at the start of the school year. Also, perhaps I'm just getting to the point where I'm mature enough to be able to sit still as long as school requires - at this point, I could have lapsed back into squirmy and have a tough time getting back to school expectations (which are kind of excessive given that they diagnose kids with the medical condition of being children).

From a teacher's perspective, I get these days off, but some of the days I may or may not get paid for, I'm still working. During the summer, maybe I do or do not have to take a separate job. Not many people want to hire seasonal workers except retail and a few other limited industries. The kids come back and I have to drill them until they're back to where I can teach them the current syllabus. They still have vacation brain, making them difficult to manage.

So far the only reason I can think of that this "works" is that that is how it has always been. But the thing is, the circumstances that drove things to "always" be that way no longer apply. Kids don't leave cities for months on end to escape the heat. Most schools have air conditioning. Virtually all businesses operate on a five day per week basis with standard hours from 8-5. More than half of all parents work, mothers and fathers. Schools aren't babysitters, but wouldn't it be better, more effective and just plain easier for kids, teachers and parents if schools operated year round or at least with far shorter summer breaks and more consistent hours? Or am I just smoking crack?

There. Done. I'm sure there are teachers out there who can explain this to me and why I'm smoking crack. Though I still reserve the right to be miffed that my kids have a two hour late start the week after they've been out of school for two weeks straight. So there.