So my hilarious friend Maren has her blog all locked up so you can't read it but she told a great story about how much she dislikes the kinder registration process and I wanted to just echo that here.
I am going to repost my comment (with modifications) from her site even though she was funnier because, well, if she has her site all locked down she probably doesn't want her post reprinted by a free-for-all blogger like myself.
The gist was that the hoops you have to jump through to register your child for kinder are annoying. To share one small example of this, every year (2 kids so far) I have to make an appointment to take my children into the dr. to get them to sign some paper saying they are kinder ready. Both times I made the appointment so late that the school was harassing me for weeks about it. So this time I totally was ahead of the game and made an appointment in February! Yay for me! So you know what the school told me? It has to be after March 1. Well too bad for them.
I think that if you already have a kid in school they should just give you one paper with a checkbox that says "same as everything on the other kids but with a new name." I happen to know that you don't have to actually have a social security number to enroll so why pretend?
When I went to enroll my #3 in kinder and they gave me the same huge packet with the rest of my kids I took my sweeeet time. I turned it in one piece at a time just to prove to them how annoying it is (or because I was disorganized). I still have to drop off her birth certificate which, again, shows that she was born somewhere. Can't they see that that by looking at her?
As for the emergency card,if all my kids have the same last name, they only need one card. If they call our emergency contact and say "Fleming No. 1 needs a ride home because the school is on fire" then the person on the other end of the line had better say "what about Fleming 2 and 3?" Problem solved. To make it tricky, I think the emergency card has different contacts for each of my kids so they will get three different rides home. That is what they get, I say.
Because I like the school people who organize all of this I make genuine attempts so I don't mess up their job which inevitably is monitored by the state or something.
Oh one more annoyance--if I don't get anything free out of it, I don't want to list my salary. They should have a box that says "I make above or below this amount per kid." I am not super private but I get tired of the "you might qualify" argument when we all know we don't. In fact next time I am going to write 1.5 billion under salary. Yeah.
The thing that makes me the MOST irritated by all of this stuff is that there are people with no social security number, who are not immunized, who do not read or write and their kids are still enrolled in school. Are they trying to say that if you don't have that paperwork turned in you can't attend public school? That has GOT to be a line. So little tommy jones (or fulano de tal) shows up to school and they say "sorry sweetie you can't come to your class because your mommy didn't feel out the pink card indicating your race." So why is it that they call me and ask me for info from the packet when I know that whether or not I send it in they will not turn away my child.
Kinder is optional anyway.
Amen. And amen to kinder next fall. ::dance of joy::
ReplyDeleteSorry to be so "secretive." We just had a psycho person comment on our blog once on a picture of our daughter, after that we went private. Probably we overreacted and 99% of what I have on there not even psycho people would care about, you can reprint if you want. But it was freaky enough that we've stayed private. No one is missing much tho.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe that you can be so laid back about it. (Kinder reg, not blogging.) Here, if you don't follow everything to the T, you don't get in. They'll send you to some other school in the district where they have room (they have room because no one wants to go to that school). Even with a sibling at the school, if I don't get my reg in on time for the "lottery" (which is a different timetable from the rest of the registration process) then too bad for me, I'm on the waitlist which is over 100 people long for kinder. We find out the results of the lottery in a few weeks, and because of sibling at the school we "should" get in, but until I get that paper in the mail, I'm stressed.
Hilarious! I will keep these points in mind when I register Renny is *gulp* one year.
ReplyDeleteThere was a child in Medea's kinder class who regularly showed up without shoes. Too cool, but allowed in. I wonder what it would take to not be allowed in school?
ReplyDeleteYou're always getting me all worked up and annoyed at things I would otherwise not think to be worked up and annoyed about. That's probably why I like you so much.
ReplyDeleteHere in tha SCUSD, where our website says that you may bring items a), b), or c) as evidence of residence, our website conveniently forgets to tell you that individual schools will turn you away for having item c) because THAT SCHOOL has a policy of requiring items a) AND b).
ReplyDeleteYou're hilarious, Lee. I love reading your blog.
-Tim Hebert
I am so glad I am not the only one that has that gripe! If you have more than 3 kids...it's a headache!
ReplyDeleteWhat's even more annoying is that we have to fill out all the same info on those annoying field trip forms...ugh! I mean, can't they get all that info from all the forms we filled out at the beginning of the year?
Thanks for the post!
one time the school secretary called--when I was in the middle of something with a crying baby--and told me that if I didn't come in RIGHT NOW and drop off Levi's immunization records they'd expel him. I told them that his immunizations were up to date--thus his last 2 years' attendance in their school--and I'd be happy to drop by his record. And she said, "You don't understand--either submit a copy of his imm record or come pick him up from school." sheesh!
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