Dropoff Hell

I will have to get a pic of this to post.

Today Louis and Bryce and I headed up to Columbia on our usual early Thursday morning run. For the midweek, Wednesday night visit, I sprint up to Columbia from JC to fetch them, we have dinner together, play games or watch a movie, go to bed, get up and motor back to Columbia, then to JC to my office. It's like a lightning round version of the weekend. Anyway, school has been in session for a week and Columbia traffic has already reached a fever pitch. It seems I drop off Louis at Middle School at the same time the office drones and the college kids are all out on the roads doing their thing, too. It is chaos. Every intersection overflows. In an attempt to mitigate traffic problems at the school, parents can only approach the dropoff circle drive from one direction. It happens to be the opposite direction from 99.9% of the city. Today the traffic was clogged in both directions despite the two traffic monitors' best attempts to maintain order. This place is swarming, infested, overcrowded, teeming with vans and SUVs and oblivious parents whose minds seem more on their next destination than their current location. dangerous stuff.

This week, I also learned that my son's lunch hour is 10:30-11:00AM. 10:30. That's not lunchtime. That's morning snack. Predictably, he says he's famished most afternoons by 3:00. This is also the week I learned Louis' classes sometimes take place in one of the many trailers on the property.

I know all schools have the trailer thing. But the thing that peeves me the most is they have sacrificed distributed administration to save costs, most likely, but also perhaps to consolidate power in the central administration. The result is kids are bused from all over the city. My son spends an hour on the bus, sometimes two, one time three hours when the substitute driver couldn't tell their nether regions from a hole in the ground. And the time since they drove all over the city to get to their single destination, there were plenty of opportunities to collide with another vehicle, an opportunity the driver decided to take that day.

Meanwhile, neighborhood schools get the shaft- they are underfunded, understaffed. The buildings are neglected. Parking and play areas rarely get upgrades.

What would be ideal is for a kid to get to go to a neighborhood school throughout their school career. They would get to know their neighbors and build local bonds. The families would meet each other through school and other events. They could walk to school, or at least be driven a short way to their school. More locations, fewer students per classroom means better learning opportunities. Fewer trailers, I can only imagine.

Don't think I'm some kind of segregationist or something. I have no problems with integration and I believe we should all be equals in each other's eyes. But there is no reason why a school in a marginal neighborhood can't be a a good school, a clean school, a well-maintained school, a school to inspire pride of membership. Lift up the school, lift up the neighborhood. Why isn't this a priority in this day and age? Celebrate a neighborhood's uniqueness instead of dooming it to failure because of stereotypes and unwillingness to let go of some control.

But instead of fixing old schools and leaving things local, school boards vote to hand over large sums to land developers (who are frequently on these boards, along with the City Council) and opt for large, expensive, very inconvenient centralized schools. Who loses? the students, mostly, and that is a shame. But the taxpaying citizens lose, too, because centralizing services like this, while it seems it would save money, actually costs a lot more in the long run. It's almost always cheaper to renovate than it is to build new (not always, of course, but usually). And there is a lot of collateral damage that their budget reports can't incorporate, like wasted personal time, higher fuel consumption, risk of life and limb with increases in traffic, and the hit that quality of life takes.

I dunno. I'm no expert, but I can't accept that this is a good thing, that this helps anyone, that it's preferable.