sarahmichelef

I personally am completely agnostic about school uniforms.  I can see their value, I can see the arguments against them.  In both cases where we are considering schools with uniforms, the uniform consists of a school polo shirt or a button-down shirt and khakis/khaki skirt or a plaid jumper.  That's pretty innocuous.  And, frankly, it's just not an issue I can get all that worked up about.

Our neighborhood school is a K-8 and the older grades are DEFINITELY a time when I can see the value of uniforms.  Let me tell you how much easier my life would have been in sixth grade if everyone had dressed the same.  I still think sixth grade would have been the worst school year ever, but it would have been a damn sight less bad.

Number of phone calls it took me to find out what it's going to take to get TRex an eval for physical therapy at school*:  four.
I knew that I needed to talk to the Committee on Preschool Special Education, and had been given a number for them by the director of TRex's school, but that number just rang and rang.  So I went on the school district website to see if I could hunt down their number.  No dice.  So I called the main district number and told them what I wanted (I stupidly did not just ask for the number for the CPSE) and they told me I needed to talk to the placement office and gave me a number to call.  That number actually turned out to be the number for "central processing".  This has been my experience EVERY time I call the school district - they shunt you to central processing and you get lost in the giant maze of phone menus until you give up.  This time, though, I outsmarted them.  When none of the options I was given addressed my immediate needs, I picked the one for the administrative associate, because it sounded like the one most likely to give me a real live human being, which it did.  She cheerfully gave me the phone number for the special ed department and from there I was able to find out that I need to send a letter with various and sundry information and then they will send me a packet of paperwork to fill out to get the ball rolling.

Still.  FOUR damn phone numbers to find out information that I should have been able to just look up on the website.

*Read the whys and wherefores of this here.

1. When someone learns that we live in the city school district, they ask, "But what are you going to do about SCHOOL????"  Yes, the school district is uneven - it's a city school district.  It also has an excellent gifted & talented elementary school program (as well as a Spanish immersion program at the same school) and a high school that is consistently ranked in the top 100 public high schools in the nation (#50 last year).  Yeah, there are a lot of "poverty schools" (using the pre-K teachers euphemism) too, but you would think from talking to people that any child enrolled in the Buffalo public schools is going to be shooting heroin by the end of kindergarten.
2. When someone learns that we take public transit every day, they ask, "But what are you going to do in WINTER????"  Um, put on a coat?  Put snow pants on the kid?  What, do they think that the trains stop running as soon as there's snow on the ground?  Or that we are incapable of wearing boots and warm clothes?