Glenn is voicing the lament I had when my kids were in school...

My local school system, which is aggressively pursuing truants and threatening parents with jail time, also seems to cancel school itself for all sorts of reasons, according to no discernible pattern.

I remember when I discovered that, during the entire school year, there is not one single month that my kids were in school for every weekday - not a single one! Amazing. There were not only the regular holidays and the Monday holidays, but also the "teacher inservice days" of which there were many.

Not only do the kids get extra full days off, but there are also the half days in which the kids either went to school late or got off early. The half days were always the most annoying. If the kids are in school for some part of the day, it is considered that the district can count that for a full day of school... (I would assume though, if I was an hourly employee for them, they wouldn't pay me for 8 hours work if I only worked one hour... but I digress).

I've had a few teachers tell me over the years, that they do all kinds of things on inservice day - training, etc. Which always made me retort... why don't you people put all this time together in a block? Do it either at the end of the year or the beginning, and stop making the lives of parents miserable by not sticking to some sort of schedule!

Until they can give me a really valid reason for having these "inservice days" during the middle of the year, I will continue to believe that these are paid vacation days for the teachers. I'm sure there are some good teachers out there who aren't enamored of this system either - I wonder when we'll see the straw that breaks the camel's back? One day the parents are going to rebel against the system - I'm just glad I'm out of it all now.

Posted by: Teresa in Education at 03:57 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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