School Daze

So Colin started another school year this Monday. Hurray for getting up at the butt-crack of dawn to make sure he's on the bus. -.- Being a working family, we've always had the issue of what to do with Colin in the hours between school letting out and the first parent arriving home. He lacks the proper judgement to be left alone too often or for too long. Last year, we didn't make it on the list for the afterschool program. Daycare centers are rackets, I tell you - we simply couldn't afford the price they charge for afterschool care. And the school wouldn't bus him home on a route that he didn't arrive on, so he couldn't stay with the home daycare we had for Clara. So we had to trust Colin to come straight home every night from the bus and stay inside and get his homework and chores done, all without any adult supervision. Maybe it was too much responsibility for a child of 8, but it was pretty clear that wasn't going to fly for long.

DeAnn took time off work to camp the afterschool program meeting this year, and got him in just under the wire. Now he has somewhere to be afterschool. All's well in another day of wine and roses, right? Well... Not quite. While the program does bus the kids home, the busing doesn't actually start until Sept. 15th. So the parents have to come and pick the kids up... See where I'm going with this? They don't release the kids until 5:20, so the place is an absolute zoo. The first day, there were kids running around the cafeteria while parents formed a big, angry pitchfork-wielding mob outside, waiting for their kids. Second day was not much better. This time, they had formed a line that wrapped around the building and down to the portables.

The only reason I didn't spend an hour picking him up was because I look important. Or rather, I can look important. If you do something and completely appear that you're supposed to do that something, people don't question it. The first day, I simply walked around the mob with a grizzled, managerial look on my face. I'm rather practiced on that one. The second one, I saw the line and said to the people at the back, "Is this the line? Man, they can keep him!" I walked around to the other side of the building, grabbed an empty folder and pen I saw sitting on a table and walked right through the guarded door. As soon as I was in, I set my props to the side, jumped to the front of the line and got my kiddo.

I know, I know... I shouldn't take advantage of the stupids. But it's just too easy not to, and what's the point of having higher intelligence if you can't use it for something. Beside, you'd think that the school administrators would exercise more wisdom in their master plan for herding our children (and the parents with them) off their property. They do, after all, work at a school...