I called my bro yesterday to wish my niece a belated happy birthday. He was in the midst of the morning chaos — getting the kids packed off to school with homeworks and lunches, while getting himself ready for work. My SIL had left for work.
We chatted briefly. I told him that my kids had off from school for Thursday and Friday, because New Jersey has a bogus teachers’ union convention that no teacher actually attends. While he doesn’t have the bogus teachers’ union convention in New York State, his school district had its own annoying random holidays that made life extremely hard for working families.
My brother went into full rant mode about how hard it was for him and his wife to find coverage for their children, when schools closed. He said, “You should write a blog post about that!!” I have, my dear bro. I have. When the kids were very young, and I worked a lot, the random school closings sucked even more for us. Â I had kids in two different school districts that each had their own random holidays. It’s extremely difficult to find anyone to watch a special needs kid. Also, Steve was not able to help out at all.
There is a growing demand for schools to stop this random holiday stuff. Parents expect that schools will conform to standard business hours. Schools do not want this responsibility. Who will win out?
I’ve got Ian in a standard public school in the standard special ed program. It’s not a great fit. His academics are better than the other classmates. They aren’t doing enought to deal with his weaknesses like pragmatic speech and social skills; a few old guard administrators say that their job is to just deal with academics. Since the school board wants to keep kids like Ian in the school district, change is happening quickly, and some people are less than pleased.
The mission for public schools is rapidly changing. (I can’t write a proper conclusion, because one of my kids who is home from school is bugging me to do a project on this computer. Ugh. Hitting “publish.” )
Apt. 11d 
I kind of like the random holidays, but I get a lot of vacation days at work.
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The go-to solution in my school district for lower-middle-class and upper-working-class parents is to put their kids in the school district’s before-and-after school daycare program. The go-to solution for poor parents with an age range of kids is to keep the older kids at home to watch the younger ones (this is what happens when younger kids are sick and school is in session, too). The go-to solution for poor parents without older children is to lose their job.
There are no upper-middle-class parents in my school district. Many of the poor parents are people who came from some small-town or some hellhole neighborhood from another city in search of some better chances—better opportunities or conditions than where they’re from. But it leaves them hard pressed for childcare, because all their relatives aren’t within driving distance. Friends can’t be relied on because all of them have the same conditions: must work, no paid leave. This country is badly in need of universal childcare. Universal childcare should be thought of like hospitals—necessary and there for when you need it, and you can count on most of the members of your community needing it even if you don’t.
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To play the other side: couldn’t the systemic answer here also that it needs to be easier for employed people to take days off? Couldn’t this be a result of American attitudes towards taking vacation/personal time/sick leave days for reasons like this and what we are afraid it says about us as workers?
If we want schools to conform to business hours, we are going to have to make that financial investment.
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Yes. including teachers, who are employees with fairly rigid schedules,
I do believe that many teachers use these “in service” days to do schoolwork and, they also need days to catch up on daytime activities.
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We are also on “random holidays” now. I don’t mind them at all. It’s interesting, actually, to remember when I started feeling perfectly happy with them — when the kids got old enough that they didn’t need that much care. At that point, they became relief in our household; a break from the work the school day imposes on everyone (getting up, driving, etc.). We’re at a private school, though, and one where most parents have a full-time caregiver (nanny, or stay-at-home mom, or in a non-negligible set of cases, stay-at-home dad).
I think teachers will win out in districts that share our private school demographics, because most parents don’t mind (even more so as their kids are older).
We have parent/teacher conferences right now, I think coinciding with the period before veteran’s day. I believe they schedule these days at least partially because a number of students will abscond on the holiday.
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PS: At reflecting “let them eat cake” privilege, don’t high school kids need their own computers these days? My older kid uses hers all the time for school work, including sending work to school, using google docs to share, to do research, download teachers’ docs and homework.
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Our grade school has chromebooks for all. Or all in 3rd grade and up.
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Our school district pretty much requires them from late elementary school up. They have a small number of school-owned computers that can be used by those without. From middle-school, they have classes in which the teachers told them to bring in a smartphone/tablet-with-internet-connectivity to do research with. Again, a small number of such devices were available in class to use, for the few that needed them. In HS, it’s ALL computer based – several text books are online only (parents can buy a personal hard copy if they want) – and every assignment (barring Math) is either typed up and printed out or on Google docs.
Extreme privilege, yes.
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I can imagine that the old guard is thinking of the “good old days” when there were SAHM’s (primarily the moms rather than the dads) who picked up the slack with volunteering and caring for kids on PD days. Lots of unpaid work hours went into helping run schools.
Having schools as a center for other services in addition to strictly academics makes sense – especially in poorer neighbourhoods. Providing breakfast as part of before school care. After care. Counselling.
Of course it gets back to providing adequate funding. If it’s that old “expand the scope without requisite funding increases”, then I’d be against it too as an administrator.
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Also, sometimes we are unhappy with the quality of the work we are already asking schools to do (like provide special ed services), and then other days, we think schools aren’t doing enough and want them to take on more responsibilities? The public education system cannot remedy all the difficulties of modern family life–“family support centers” are not synonymous with educating children.
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In Europe, there are community centers administered by municipalities that welcome students when schools are closed. Some are attached to the town hall, others are freestanding. I think this is a problem that local politicians could solve with coordination of resources and technology (say, an online/telephone reservation system so you’d know how many kids were attending on a given day, that you’d need to feed, and what their needs were). Why do we not have a Minister, Secretary, or even a “Czar” of Family Issues, like they do elsewhere? Rhetorical question… because Americans think it is an individual problem to solve.
On the technology question, it absolutely is driving me crazy that schools are assuming my children have their own computers.. and printers! Every online homework and research assignment, which saves schools $ in textbooks, requires me to lose work time so that my kids can get *their* things done for the following day. In some classes in the 6th and 7th grade, students are asked to take out their phones to do research! My kid doesn’t have a phone and gets embarrassed about it.
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Both of us work in an industry where working from home is common, so random holidays haven’t bothered us much – and now that the kids are old enough to stay home by themselves, it’s a good thing. Gives them a break, they get to wake up as late as they like and laze around, and given usual teen waking hours, it’s only a few hours before we’re back from work 🙂
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What age range? Are we discussing elementary, middle school, high school?
In our small town, the idea of child care for middle school children is often raised by people who aren’t said children’s parents. Nothing terrible has happened in the last decade, while middle schoolers have often come home to empty houses.
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In Illinois, it is illegal to leave children under thirteen by themselves. That isn’t to say people don’t do it; they do, but there is a risk. That risk is greater for single mothers, especially single mothers of color, who aren’t likely to be given the benefit of the doubt by authorities. A friend of mine really went through the wringer when she got caught leaving her eleven and ten year old as “latchkey kids” for the two hours between the time they got home from school and the time she git home from work. It wasn’t her normal routine, but her usual childcare provider (her mother) was hospitalized at the time. It was a tough, expensive fight to keep her kids from being shipped to foster care.
Technically, DCFS caseworkers have some latitude for kids who are close to legal age for being left alone, but that latitude and ‘extenuating circumstances’ aren’t granted to everyone—which means a lot of parents, out of economic necessity, are drilling their children in distrust of authorities or anyone who comes off as if they’re taking too much notice.
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There are only 5 states with legally mandated limits on when a child can be left at home — Illinois is a serious outlier, with an age limit of 14 (the others are NC, MD, at 8, and NM, OR, 10.
http://www.latchkey-kids.com/latchkey-kids-age-limits.htm
That’s a fairly bizarre age limit in Illinois. It would be interesting to hear the history of the law.
I’m completely comfortable leaving my 13 yo at home alone, and in charge of her 11 yo brother, and of leaving the 11 yo alone. Now, that’s on an occasional basis. I don’t know what decision I’d make if they were routinely being left home alone. Different considerations.
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That’s insane. I started babysitting at age 11. My mother became a single mom 2 weeks before my 11th birthday, and I frequently stayed at home by myself after that. I went to middle school within walking distance of my home (which I walked to by myself), and was home much earlier than my brother and sister. I was home alone for about an hour and a half every day. If I got sick during school, I had to wait in the nurse’s office until my brother got out of high school and could come get me. If I was sick enough to stay home, my mother left me home alone.* (I remember thinking it weird that I could stay home from school by myself, walk home from school to an empty house by myself, but if I was sick, I wasn’t allowed to leave school early by myself.) High school was an open campus and we were allowed to come and go as we please. I took the city bus to school, and was pretty independent. This was the 90s, so the culture was maybe a little different bought not that different.
*This was for me the first realization that getting sick as an adult sucks, because you’re left to take care of yourself while feeling like crap.
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Always a good time to bring out one of my favorite scenes from The Middle:
Brick: Sue, how old were you when mom let you stay home alone?
Sue: Let’s see. She left me alone twice accidentally when I was 8, and then on purpose when I was 9.
Frankie: What?! First of all, there’s no way that that’s true, and if it is true, it’s because girls mature faster than boys.
Brick: Axl, how old were you when mom let you stay home alone?
Frankie: You don’t have to answer that! You’re not on trial here.
Axl: Huh. Let’s see. Uh. Well, accidentally when I was 6, and then for real when I was about 9.
(The Middle is far far superior to Modern Family, if you ask me.)
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I just had a colleague complaining about this. The public schools close for election day, but private schools don’t, so she had to figure something out for her elementary age kid. Her youngest was in full-time daycare, but her oldest–in 1st grade–had nowhere to go. So she brought him to work for a bit, and then took the rest of the day off. She was so pissed at a) the school district and b) our own school, whose time off policy isn’t the best.
Something has to give, either the government/school system provides some kind of care, or businesses need to give parents the day off.
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I work at a university and in recent years, I have started noticing that it’s often dads who have random kids with them on those school holidays — in the classroom, at meetings. I’m thinking it’s got to be that mom has a job where showing up with kids would be frowned on so the default position is that dad gets to take the kids with him.
I liked Christiana’s comment about the various types of drop-in centers available in Europe. We lived in Germany and there was a kindergarten at the end of our street where similar types of services were provided. I found myself wondering about the mentally ill woman who recently drowned her autistic son. I wonder if it could have been prevented had she had those types of resources available to her.
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I’ve probably mentioned this ad nauseam, but my elementary school was very full service. It was a Title 1 school who received extra funds for desegregation, and the principal ran it by providing a huge range of social services and bussing in middle class kids so that working class kids would get the advantages that middle class parents provide, like in-classroom volunteering. The school had an on-site day care with after school care and care for siblings too young for head start. We had free basic dental care (cleanings, sealants) provided during school hours. There were also after school activities for kids and a range of services for parents, including parenting classes and counseling. The school also provided funding for in-state college education to all alumni who finished high school with a C average, no kids, and no drugs or alcohol. Service days and parent teacher conferences were grouped together in a two week span, and instead of days off parents and other volunteers taught “mini-classes” for the kids, which were art or PE based activities of the volunteers’ choosing. Examples included kick-ball, basket weaving, pumpkin pie making. (My mother taught soap making one year, and made soap with lye. Not sure how multiple competent adults thought that was a good idea for elementary age kids, but no one got hurt). Our school was nationally recognized for producing outstanding results for disadvantaged kids, but it took a lot of money, the superhuman efforts of one woman, and required the full backing of a larger community for things like a nanny-state educational environment, good education funding, and the willingness of white middle class parents to bus their kids into a poor mostly African American school and devote lots of time to providing direct help to kids not like their own. When budget cuts hit the schools, the principal retired, and the neighborhood gentrified, the school went downhill. (Ironically, it’s a worse school now with yoga studios and gluten free bakeries next to it than it was when surrounded by crack houses, boarded up storefronts, and a Twinkie factory).
My church was in a similarly terrible neighborhood as my school, and not long before he died my father started a drop in center for neighborhood youth to have a safe place to hang out and do homework (with volunteer tutors) and get healthy snacks and play fun games. It was aimed primarily at elementary
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hmm…looks like my comment got cut off. Meant to say elementary-middle schoolers. Anyways, we left the church not long after my dad’s death, but it looks like the Drop-in center is still going strong. It provides after school and summer care for K-7, and now charges a sliding scale fee of $10-$40/week, plus scholarships. They also do school pickups from two neighborhood schools.
http://www.bethelpdx.org/about/ydic
Anyways, it would be nice if stuff like this was more systematized rather than ad hoc care left to churches and other charity groups, though if you look you can find things like this.
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Wow. All of those things sound like things we should be doing. I’ve been wondering, recently, though, about how important the charismatic figure, the one who finds the job a vocation that they are willing to devote their life to is in the success of such endeavors. And, it’s not enough that the person be an idealist worth devoting their life to the cause; they also have to have the necessary skills.
I’ve seen two idealistic schooling ventures in a developing country in their incipient stages. One, through the philanthropists who endowed the activity and the other through the on the ground people who started the endeavor. One failed; the other is, 5 years after the inception, a success. A key difference i see in the two endeavors (though funding might have also played a major role), is that the successful endeavor was lead by a charismatic administrator (not a teacher) who was effective in managing students, parents, and teachers. The other was lead by an equally dedicated person, who was not effective at managing any of the groups.
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People, I know comments have been getting swallowed. They aren’t in the spam filter. I’m going to update the operating system for this website and see if that helps. SORRY!!
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FYI – that “bogus” conference in NJ — and why the teachers often don’t go — if they do go, it’s all out of pocket. They are not funded to go — way too costly for meager school budgets. So essentially, they would have to pay upwards of $1000 (hotels in AC, registration fees, travel, etc.) out of their already meager salaries. I’m not sure about the actual value added of the conference and do not begrudge the teachers who do not go the time, but this fact about the financing saddens me.
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Yeah, that’s not why they don’t go. My sister, who was a NJ teacher for many years, never went, because she thought it was a waste of time. Many of her friends, all fellow NJ teachers, used the days off to travel to Disney.
If the majority of NJ teachers aren’t actually attending the conference, whether because of preference or because of finances, then it seems like a crazy reason to inconvienence working parents.
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I wonder if they count those as professional development days, of which a certain number is required a year.
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And, whether even if most teachers don’t go, enough do that it would be impossible to keep the schools open and functioning as anything more than babysitting. And, whether they’d go if they were funded to go. Looked at the conference, and I think it sounds fun. But then, I like thinking about teaching kids (more than teaching, so I’d probably be different from most K-12 teachers).
I think this is a basic labor/management battle, disagreement about the schools being closed for a teachers’ conference, or teachers having work days when they don’t have to deal with the kids. It looks to me like NJ teachers have 5 work days in their year that they don’t have kids, which doesn’t sound at all unreasonable to me.
I remember a university med school prof informing others of the burden imposed by the requirement that he couldn’t spend more than 1 month off campus through the year (also had clinical responsibilities). The basic science profs said that they hadn’t noticed the requirement (if it applied to then, which it might have), and there were certainly profs who were away for more than that many days, and who got paid more than teachers generally do.
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School districts in our part of the state have started to close in waves when snow hits. My theory is that even if the snow isn’t that bad in one town, much of the staff will live in other towns. If all the teachers have to bring their kids to work, chaos erupts. If faced with a choice of leaving their children at home alone, or taking a sick day (of which many teachers have saved a surplus), many teachers will take the sick day. Which would leave a principal with many children, but few teachers.
I do, though, think that our society is getting over-protective. I think of this study, done in Britain: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html. (All these comments apply to typically developing children, not kids with challenges.) In a way, the default is becoming that children are being taught to need adults around them all the time.
This sets up a bad situation, though, when they’re “adults,” and it’s hands-off. They turn 18, and the adults in the family stop seeing medical and school records, if the new “adults” don’t give permission.
And there are suddenly salespeople about, eager to issue these new adults the symbols of adulthood (for a fee, of course.) Cell phone plans. Credit card companies. Student loans.
Wouldn’t it make sense to ease people into adulthood gradually, with things such as allowing them to stay at home without an adult when they’re ready? Assuming competence, in a sheltered fashion, just seems to me to be more rational, than to assume incompetence, then drop them in the deep end (and forbid their support systems, i.e. families, to receive the information necessary to scaffold adulthood.)
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It’s funny we’re talking about this because on my parenting list there’s been a discussion about whether or not 2 15-year-old girls could stay at one’s home overnight by themselves. Interestingly, the bigger concern is perception/image than whether or not the kids will be in any danger.
We’ve been leaving E home alone since he was 10, but at night, only in the last 6 months or so (for something longer than driving S to dance, a 10-min RT). He is 12 now, and S is 15, so now we often leave them alone so we can do stuff like go to movies or out to dinner or even to a friend’s BBQ. Overnight? I’m not ready. S probably is. But I think it is worry over how it will look.
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It probably depends on where the home is located, and whether the parents will be far away.
I would be very wary of leaving high school students alone overnight in their own home. Not so much if they’re babysitting at someone else’s home. Do their friends/classmates have cars and cell phones? I know parents who came home unexpectedly from a weekend away to find raging parties going on.
Some of the parents claimed that their children had not invited anyone. Just the knowledge that teenagers were home alone made the house a target for partiers. (I must admit though, that my daughter who knew the girl in question doubted that story.)
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” I know parents who came home unexpectedly from a weekend away to find raging parties going on.”
We were warned of this by the parents next door, who told us that our house used to be the party house, because the parents would go away and leave the children in charge. At least one party ended with the police being called. They then always left an adult with the kids when they traveled. According to them, the real issue was that kids would learn of the missing parents, and then invite themselves to a party, and that they didn’t want to put their children in the position of having to turn friends away.
My child is very responsible, but she’d have a tough time with turning kids away. But, I think this worry might not apply if your child is not within range of a crowd that likes to party. I don’t know if kids would try to co-opt the house of someone completely outside of their social circle (though maybe that happens, too, if there are no other options).
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