Bureaucracies

I've started teaching the Saturday class again. It is good. Again. Instructional aides from elementary and middle schools come two Saturdays a month and my partner and I teach them all about the writing curriculum and how to be more effective with their students. I enjoyed it so much last year, and it looks like this year will be just as pleasant. It is hard work, but at least I have last year's lesson plans to revise and reuse parts of so that we're not just re-inventing the wheel.

But...there is a new person at the top of the food chain in the department that sponsors this class and so our requests for supplies were not automatically filled (small stuff: copy paper, single subject notebooks) and so today when we started the class, we didn't have the notebooks. I didn't find out until we arrived at the building. The supervisor was so apologetic. She thought she'd be able to approve our supply lists at her level, but was stopped, and she explained it most tactfully. New supervisor, new rules. It is obvious that the new person is just attempting to assert the "who is in charge" vibe. So, while my partner teacher taught a section he'd planned, I zipped down the street to the store and picked up the 29 notebooks we needed to pass out.  The writer's notebooks are an essential part of our curriculum. That's why I asked for them...duh. But, problem solved. They'll reimburse me. She thinks. I don't actually care if they don't; I needed them.

Then, at school, we've got a wonderful field trip planned. We go to this local nature park every year. I call and get our date on the first day of school, because it is a popular destination and they have limited times. If you don't get your appointment within the first two or three days of school, you won't get one. We sent out our two permission slips, stapled together: one copy we take with us (it explains the field trip, collects phone numbers of parents and offers them a chance to come with us) and the official school district form that allows us to take their children from the school site on a bus to this area. This form stays in the office. On Friday, our secretary came to my room with a THIRD form required by our newly reconfigured "area" (the division of the gigantic school district to which we are now assigned after our new superintendent started making his changes.)  I read it and flipped out. Then, I apologized to the secretary.

This form requests from the parents the information about their medical insurance coverage---on the level that you would give to a doctor's office so that they can bill your insurance company! What company; who is covered; who is the person that the insurance is assigned to; what or if the secondary insurance is; what your child's medical conditions are, etc. etc. Then, in the legal fine print at the end of the form, it attempts to have the parents sign off that they will not sue the district over any medical care we give their kid on the field trip, if it is needed. The principal was out of town on Friday. But on Monday, I'm going in to discuss this intrusive form. I know it isn't her fault. It is some anal person in our new "area"--but there is no way I'm sending this form to my parents. If I were asked to sign that type of form just to let my child go on a three hour field trip, I'd write across the front of it ---"NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS"---and return the paper to school.

 It is completely obnoxious. And redundant. One of the forms they've already signed has the legal language that allows us to take their children on the bus away from school. The nurse already has all the health information about each child, from a form the parents completed as part of our First Day of School paperwork. It is none of our business what insurance they have, if they even have any. If their child needs medical care at a hospital, the EMTs are going to transport that kid and the hospital is going to treat that kid and no stupid invasive paper is going to facilitate or allow that. Okay, I'll take a breath. I just hope that I'll have calmed down enough when I go in and talk to our principal. I'm pretty sure she'll see it my way. She may be able to get the bureaucrats in the central office to be reasonable and see how obnoxious this THIRD field trip permission form is for us to give to parents. I've been going on field trips in this district for six years without this new form. Where did it come from now??

As I ranted to CoolGuy last night, "I sent my teenage clarinet playing son to NYC from Maryland on a three day band trip and I didn't have to tell the school who my insurance policy was with or who the adult in our family was who paid for it."  CoolGuy patiently listened to me stomp around and wave my arms and vent and then started to laugh. "Next time, I'll let the secretary know that she should just call me first before asking you to do ridiculous assignments like this. I could save her a lot of trouble by vetting these things for her. Don't ask Mrs.[ESM] to offend her parents or jump through these kind of hoops. She'll come at you with logic and reason and passion. You don't have a chance."