A Seventh Open Letter to the School District

Dear folks in charge of the decision making down at the School District,

On March 13, 2020 you sent our kids home from school and told us we were all going to quarantine for two weeks to “flatten the curve.”

Yesterday, 389 calendar days after we began our 14-day curve flattening, our kids finally attended classes on campus for a full school day.

Since you are in charge of the schools, I assume you can do the math on how lame that is, but then again, maybe not.

There isn’t anything you can do to make it up to the high school seniors who graduated from home in their pajamas last year, and not much more you can do for the current students, other than to make sure you never do this again.

And before you start getting all defensive and telling me that it wasn’t your fault and there was nothing you could do, and you did your best, blah, blah, I have to ask you - Whose job is it to keep the schools open and running? And be careful with your answer, because if it’s not you, then we don’t need you…

Now that you’ve come to terms with how poorly you’ve done your job over the last 389 days, there is one group of people that you can definitely make it up to. Your inability or unwillingness to do the one thing you’re actually supposed to be doing has caused our teachers more grief than they ever should have had to deal with. They already have to deal with teenagers, for goodness sake!

Between all-virtual, back on campus, and some mix of the two, my boys’ teachers have had to completely change the way they taught their classes a minimum of four times this year. I realize that doesn’t affect you over at your offices, but rest assured, it greatly affected the folks you’re charged with shepherding – the students and their teachers. Not to mention, you turned me into a very unwilling homeschool teacher, which wasn’t good for anyone. Trust me!

Here’s what I propose you do for our teachers: Take a good hard look at your staffing levels over at the district office. Make a list of the absolutely essential personnel, and really drill it down to just the bare minimum amount of folks required to run your operations.

When you have that list in hand, fire all the people on the list and keep all the people you regarded as non-essential. Maybe they’ll keep the schools open next time. No doubt they’ll do a much better job than you did.

They can choose to stick around and run things at 50% of their current salaries, and we’ll take the other 50% along with the massive salaries freed up from all you “essential” personnel and give it all to the teachers – this year and going forward.

That’s the best solution. The teachers are, as evidenced, the only ones working for these kids.

Full disclosure: My wife is a teacher, so this is all very self-serving on a number of levels, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Yours in educational excellence through continued partnership,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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COVID-19 Shutdown Forced Homeschool Parent Log – Day 33

Forced Homeschool Parent Log – Day 33

Hope was lost on Day 4. Now all that we have is the endless grind.

Today is our last day of what the school district laughingly referred to as “spring break.” In the before-time, spring break was scheduled to be only one week. We had dreams of travel and adventure. Those dreams are now but a distant and crushed memory of what once was. Just darkness ahead now. The darkness of remote learning.

After my exceedingly polite letter to them asking for the elimination of spring break this year due to the extenuating circumstances, the school district actually extended our new worthless, trapped, virus-ridden “spring break” an extra three days. A cruel, possibly vindictive joke that only forced us to come up with three more days of spring break home school courses until the distance learning begins again tomorrow.

We covered lawn maintenance, car maintenance, pool maintenance, irrigation system maintenance, bicycle maintenance, vacuum cleaner maintenance, coffee maker maintenance, electric wine opener maintenance, garage paint can collection maintenance, shower drain maintenance, and today, toenail maintenance.

The curriculum for my Appreciation for the Cinematic Arts of the ‘80s & ‘90s class was derailed by an academic mutiny, led mostly by my wife. I think I lost her trust at Uncle Buck and, amazingly, failed to regain it with Crocodile Dundee I and II. Whatever. It’s not like anything matters anymore.

The mutineers have decided that we will instead watch every single Marvel Avengers movie (approximately three hundred of them) in timeline order. We are halfway through and, consequently, our couch has developed an impenetrable layer of popcorn residue that is either serving as a protective barrier against wear and tear, or slowly destroying the cushions underneath us. Time will tell.

Meals have devolved into a standard routine of serve-yourself brunch, snack at random, and usually cereal for dinner, with dessert popcorn during the nightly Marvel movies. At first, we were ashamed of what we’ve become. Now we embrace it.

If the boys start to annoy us too much now, we’ve taken to keeping them in the game room by getting “high COVID readings” on my new “COVID meter” (one of our old Blackberry phones). We tell them there’s a viral outbreak in the kitchen or the family room, or wherever, and I put on my welding helmet and Latex dish gloves, hold a can of Lysol, and tell them to shelter in place until I have disinfected the stricken room. Then my wife and I have a few drinks on the patio before we give them the all-clear.

In an effort to limit our store trips, we have been attempting to eat as much as possible from our pantry and our freezers. We have a large chest freezer in the garage that slowly filled up to the top with frozen delicacies over the years. We are more than halfway down into the frozen cavern now, and ice axes have been deployed. Any attempt to retrieve food at this point looks like an arctic expedition.

Tonight, we are having a Stouffer’s Party Size Macaroni & Cheese that no one can remember purchasing, paired with some Van de Kamp’s Crunchy Fish Sticks that would have expired in 2009 had they not been completely encased in ice all these years.  

Or cereal.

Stay strong, people!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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