An Observation Suggested By Shawn Teves
Happy New Year, my fellow Observers! I hope this article finds you all happy, healthy, not too hung over and well rested after our holiday break. I also trust that everyone is prepared to rise early and get back into the regular swing of things in just 32 short hours. Even sooner if you have to get your kiddies off to school. I'm referring to elementary students, of course. If your still getting your high schooler up and dressed for the bus, you've got other issues that need to be addressed besides a really early day. On the subject of early days, I've been wondering lately why it seems that grammar school days around the state are starting before the rooster crows. I remember high school being early but now it seems the grade schoolers are starting at the time I started my high school day. And I had to travel across two towns to get to mine. I was also curious as to why our school bus was picking our daughter up earlier yet dropping her off later and later. A recent bus schedule change has made her drop off even later.
A couple of months ago our principal rode our daughter's bus in response to parent complaints in an attempt to find out why it was falling behind in it's drop off times. Although her findings were never made available to the parents in her principal's biweekly update an early trip through town gave me the answer in just under 10 minutes. While on an errand run, a couple of weeks ago, I had the misfortune that everyone who drives dreads. I got behind a school bus picking up children. Since it was close to the start of the school day and living very close to the school, I didn't think much of it, figuring that the run was close to the end and I would soon be on my over 15mph merry way soon, free of the blinking red lights and flip out stop sign. I couldn't have been more wrong if I told my wife the reason I forgot our anniversary was because it was a leap year. Even though we were within a quarter mile of the school, the bus seemed to keep stopping. It didn't take me long to realize why. While picking up one child at a bend in the road, I was able to see the next child waiting at the end of her driveway..... right next door. Sure enough the bus turned off it's lights, pulled in it's stop sign, drove 50 feet and turned them back on again stopping to pick up the little girl I saw waiting. We live in a complex and the bus picks up all of the children at our address at once, so I never really gave it much thought, but no wonder why the bus takes so long to go to and from school. Far be it from me to point out to all the administrators that are responsible for the care of our children, some going to college for that very reason, that this practice is ridiculous. Whatever happened to bus stops? You know, where all the kids in the neighborhood walked to or got dropped off at, to get picked up en masse. I also would be negligent in my Observation if I didn't point out that several of the children I was waiting for to get on the big yellow transport would have been walkers in my day. Remember unsupervised walkers?.... Well the current school system doesn't seem to. My daughter pointed out to me that her school does have walkers but not a lot of people seem to allow their K through 5 kids to be walkers.
They seem to have forgotten a lot of things over the years since my school days and a lot of the things they've forgotten share a regrettable common denominator.... parent complaints. Our children can't have Christmas parties because of parent complaints. The school bus has to stop at every house, no matter how close they are because of parent complaints. Children aren't allowed to walk or ride bikes to school, have cookies for snacks, cupcakes for in school birthday celebrations due to parent complaints. And it's not just limited to Connecticut. A California grammar school cancelled a decades long tradition of a field trip to visit Santa along with a Connecticut school system banning Halloween parties because of parent complaints. Our daughter's bus schedule was reversed in the afternoon in favor of an after school program being dropped off earlier because of, you guessed it my loyal reader, a parent complaint. The thing that bothers me the most about all of this is that most of the complaints aren't coming from a group of parents petitioning the administration for change. A lot of the school boards are rolling over and playing dead because of one parent's opinion or gripe. I could understand and accept an organized majority, but one person being able to dictate policy for hundreds because the school board is so afraid of that parent making trouble for them doesn't make much sense to me. I understand that any public board wants to prevent social brush fires from popping up but should have the common sense not to waste our resources when it's only some overprotective jerk throwing sparks.
Where do these people come from anyway? Most of these crybabies grew up in my generation and I don't remember any of my classmates complaining that they didn't celebrate Christmas or Halloween as we were devouring our holiday candy. We all seemed to have fun hanging out with each other at the bus stop in the morning. Nobody's parents complained about their precious little babies having to walk to and from school alone. I remember parents bringing in cake, candles and Hi-C for a classmates birthday. My own mother did and none of the other parents had a problem with her. Heaven help them if they did. I can't even fathom how far her lid would have flipped if someone told her that what she baked wasn't good enough for their children and suggested she should have brought in celery instead. As far as the bus schedule is concerned, I have to point out that due to all the stops it has to make, if my seven year old daughter takes the bus in the morning and in the afternoon she has an 8 1/2 hour day..... at seven my daughter has a longer day than some adults have at their jobs. Why isn't anyone complaining about that? That's a complaint the school board should listen to and do something about. Not slapping a Nilla Wafer out of our children's hands and shouting "No!".
This type of mentality seems to have only taken hold in the last ten years or so. I know this because there is a fifteen year difference between our daughter and our son. My wife and I remember a bus stop for our son and our nieces in grade school. We remember unsupervised walkers being dismissed first at our son's school. We remember bringing in goodies (that would now be considered junk) to school for our son's Halloween Parades and Christmas parties that are no longer allowed because our school leaders are afraid of offending someone. Exactly when these people took hold of how we raise our children, what they can celebrate, eat, walk, ride, get picked up or dropped off and how it happened is a mystery, but an unfortunate reality. I addressed part of this issue in the past article www.governmentmom.blogspot.com and have not received an answer to the questions I posed a year ago that have made me understand this practice and don't expect one any time soon to alleviate my confusion. What I still want to know is when did we allow this type of one sided thinking run our schools and why have we allowed it to last past the first ludicrous suggestion? I might be in the minority, but I think our generation turned out just fine despite all we have issues with these days. Well... most of us did anyway. I suppose I can't count the idiots that are crying and moaning about how wrong we all are and how neglectful and narcissistic our parents were in giving our children, and us, some room to breathe. It's funny how no one has come up with a clinical name to label what these people suffer from yet. I'm open to suggestions. Painusgluteophobic does come to mind though. Or maybe they suffer from Deafasapostitus as my experience has shown me in trying to talk to them. I guess it's hard to hear a reasonable argument while your trying to smother someone.... with love. With that being stated, I still stand by my opinion that our generation ended up alright being raised the way we were. You know why? Because there was nothing wrong with it in the first place. As a matter of fact, I have a suspicion that we are doing more harm with all the restrictions we are putting on today's children. The reigns are too tight and we are not allowing our kids to be.... kids. We are trying too hard to shelter them from things we shouldn't be. We are not letting them explore their ability to make a certain amount of their own decisions. To allow them to enjoy the joy of their successes and learn from their failures and mistakes. The type of protection we are attempting doesn't exist. It's an illusion that a only choice few feel is actually working. Trouble is we are letting those "choice few" impose their smoke and mirror values on all of us and worse.... our children. Strictly an Observation. If you'll excuse me, my daughter's shift is over.
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