The Sordid School Story

And now, at long last, for the details of our last-minute decision to transfer big boy to another school. I think I've probably told most of the 14 of you who read this blog the whole story in person, but here's the recap for those of you who have been out of cell phone range this week and have been wondering about the disturbance in the force you felt when my head asploded on Sunday. Yes, that's another Star Wars reference. It's contagious.

I will begin with a tiny bit of background. Boy's old school was started two years ago and has been adding one grade per year, with an ultimate goal of having grades pre-K through 8. The school has space in two buildings previously owned by a church, and operated in only one of those buildings for its first two years. Plans were in place to renovate the second building to include a gym, cafeteria, and some classrooms. As recently as the end of July, school officials expressed, to a parent audience, confidence that construction would be completed in time for the opening of the 07-08 school year next week. In the meantime, the old cafeteria was demolished and replaced with offices for staff.

The revelation that caused the aforementioned head asplosion on Sunday was that the construction on the second building has not been completed and may, in fact, not yet be started, because no one got the necessary permits. The biggest immediate problem is that there is no cafeteria for the several hundred children who will begin the school year on Monday. The school's solution (which was already undertaken before any notice was given to parents) was to BUY A TENT, and pitch it in the courtyard, and have the children eat in it for the duration of the construction. The duration, incidentally, is being spun as "until November," which I believe is constructionese for "July of 2010."

A note about myself - I often overreact to an unforeseen situation at first, but upon reflection chill out a bit and learn to accept my new reality. In this case, I found I was doing the opposite. Although my initial reaction was mostly amusement at just how ludicrous the whole thing is, the more I thought about it, the more upset I got. My primary objections to the tent solution, in no particular order:

1) This is the mid-Atlantic. If we are charitable and assume that lunch will only be under the Big Top until November as planned, that still covers a time period that could include extreme heat, extreme cold, rain, snow, even hurricanes. None of which are rendered more pleasant by time spent under vinyl. Are tents made of vinyl? Sorry, not the point.
2) This is Baltimore. The city mammal should be the rat, if it's not already. Hundreds of kids eating outdoors daily, plus rats. This does not seem wise.
3) If/when they finally do the necessary construction, it will be in an old building directly next to the tent. Asbestos? Lead? Aerosolized by renovation and sprayed into the air next to the tent? Hmmm.
4) The school is between two fairly busy streets in a big city. I'm not hyper-paranoid about child predators in general, but having kids eat outside every day at the same time with limited security seems like an open invitation to local creeps.
5) The kids used to use the courtyard that now houses Circus Circus for recess. Now, they won't have anywhere to go for recess except/unless each individual teacher, at his or her discretion, chooses to take a much larger amount of time away from instruction to walk the kids the extra distance to the park.
6) I'm not crazy about the underlying themes of incompetence, miscommunication, lying, and poor prioritization that this latest incident exemplifies.

I had already seriously considered moving him several times, so this was really just the straw breaking my back. I'm sort of bad at committing to decisions in general, but I've felt such relief since making this one that I really believe it's the right one. I will miss the community at the old school and I hope they are able to pull it together and achieve what they're trying to achieve there, but I think that it's best for our family, and this child in particular, to be in a more stable and safe environment.

And that took an inhumanly long time to write up and may not make any sense at all, and I'm going to bed. 'School' is starting to gain on 'sleep' in the list of bad things people don't tell you about having kids.