Whassup With The Potentially Shorter School Year?

This year the school year may wind up being seven days shorter, and I'm steamed about it.  You can read more here:  http://momsla.com/2011/08/the-school-year-may-be-seven-days-shorter-whats-a-working-mom-to-do/

A Three-Week Winter Break? Really, LAUSD?

We have -- just barely -- survived the three-week winter break that is mandatory in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Dear LAUSD school board, what are you thinking?   A three-week winter break?  REALLY?

My friends with kids in other school districts gasp in amazement.  Not one of them can believe it when they hear about it.

Taking kids out of their routine and plunging them into the hands of their exhausted working parents, NOT ONE OF WHOM HAS THREE WEEKS OFF over Christmas, is friggin' nuts.

Here's what happened around here.  Late Blooming Mom and Dad enrolled our kids in winter break camp, which while not outrageously expensive, is still an added strain on the family budget.  Winter camp was held the week before Christmas at a school that's not far, but still isn't our home school, necessitating our kindergarteners getting used to a new campus ("Where's the bathroom, mommy?").  Luckily, our workplaces were closed Christmas Eve day and New Year's Eve day, so we didn't have to pay for childcare on those days.  But there was no camp the week between Christmas and New Year's.  What, exactly, are working parents supposed to do?

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Working Mom's Latest Fear: Will I Be Sucked Into The School Volunteer Vortex?

There are 43 committees at my kids' school's parent booster club.

Is it just me, or does that sound like school volunteer overkill? 

Since my kids have been in kindergarten -- two weeks -- I have filled out dozens of forms from the club, not to mention the kids' teachers, all to do with what activities I can volunteer to be a part of, in the classroom and outside of it, ranging from re-shelving library books to driving kids to and from field trips to helping to organize and run any of the myriad of fund-raising events and activities that occur throughout the year. I've been told of mandatory commitments per child at the school, e.g., every family has to work one traffic safety shift, at pickup or drop-off, per child, during the year. I have been invited to no less than four volunteer events, and I've already missed two of those. I've been asked to contribute the "suggested" amount per child -- and nothing that you can pay in ten installments is cheap --  because, though a public education is free, a great one is not -- especially nowadays.  Every day brings more mail in the kids' backpacks, offering additional ways to get involved.

If I get another piece of paper from the parent association, it's quite possible my head is going to explode.

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Every Child Left Behind

Utah is thinking of dropping 12th grade.

The state can no longer afford to pay for it.

That's how much value the state of Utah places on education, I guess. I'd like to say California, where I live, has its priorities a little more in order. But not much. This week, two school districts in my area, Santa Monica-Malibu and Los Angeles Unified, say they're probably going to shorten the school year by five days because of budget shortfalls.

That's five fewer days in which to teach kids the very same curriculum that teachers had a full school year to teach this year. Yet somehow, they've got to cram it all in.

LAUSD is already closed for three weeks at Christmas. When I was a kid, I NEVER had a three-week Christmas break. Did you?

WTF?

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