By Meredith Jacoby
It is 5:45 in the morning; I hear my 13-year-old preparing for another long day at school. Up until 10:30 p.m. the night before doing homework and squeezing in some piano practice. I get a tired word in with him to make sure he is OK but to also make sure we understand the day’s schedule, the logistics of how best to handle the challenge of having so much to do. I think to myself, “but he is 13 and he is tired and his brain and body need a break.” As a parent I do not have this choice because if he takes a break, shows up late, chooses to skip what seems like extraneous homework or misses school our system punishes him even though he is a straight-A student.
Now it is 7:15 in the morning. I have let my little ones sleep as long as I can and still as I wake them they are tired eyed and slow to move. I feel sure it is unhealthy for my 7-year-old to be woken up so early, and I know his brain will never learn tired as much as it could absorb if he had enough rest. I am not as concerned with his records as much as his older brother so I fight a little more against the imposition of the system but in doing so have accumulated over 60 official tardies, all marks that impose punishment on him. I received a patronizing computerized letter generated by the supervisory union reminding me how important it is to show up for school on time. He too, on paper is doing very well in school.
According to the American Pediatrics Society, school should not start before 8:30 a.m., but I do not need them to tell me how exhausted and over scheduled my children are. We are at Warren Elementary School, the last school to transfer to the new supervisory union elementary start time of 7:40 a.m. As parents we had no input and learned that it was done to make it easier for the administrators to schedule staff meetings. When I spoke to our principal about this she agreed that many parents are struggling with the earlier start time, but there is nothing that can be done.
The start time is just one example. It is the tip of a very large, looming iceberg exemplifying the move toward running our local and national schools like large corporations, where attention to streamlining administrative and budgetary guidelines makes sense to best serve administrators and budgets but overlook and undermine the families they are being hired to serve.
To say I am tired of having people that are far removed from my children making decisions that continually feel so out of sync with our needs is an understatement. But more than anything, I am tired of the notion that we have no choice. That it is “just the way it is” and that the system is so large, so overly chock-full of rules and regulations that accountability is almost completely lost.
Public school is the only option my family has and yet every day when I leave my children (noting that my two oldest now spend more waking time with their schools than they do with me) I do not have faith that the choices being made will nurture and prepare them for the world that awaits them.
I converse daily with teachers and parents who agree our schools could use a facelift, from our curriculum to our lunches and physical spaces. We agree, as backed up by conventional research, that kids need to play more, have more time outside, less homework and take less tests. These conversations, unfortunately, remain in the vacuum of social settings since many of us feel that the officials who are making these choices are uninterested and inaccessible.
For any public system, run for the soul intent to serve its people, to be so completely out of control of the people is not only depressing, it is wrong. It is our money that funnels into paying for the costs of education. It is essentially us who are truly at the top of this hierarchy. We, the people, have the choice and most importantly have a vote with which to exercise that choice.
The approach of the state and the federal government to override our local preferences whether it be for testing, consolidation legislation, staff choices, school start times or even what we serve our kids for lunch is oppressive and provokes images throughout our history that are, in my opinion, some of the scariest and most regrettable. The more we are unable to exercise our personal and local free will and are given room in this system to opt out of unnecessary mandates, the more we are stuck watching our schools fail, feeling powerless to do anything about it.
I believe wholeheartedly in the ideology of public education but cannot comfortably say, especially when watching the way my children are spending their time, that our public educational leaders are doing a viable job in supporting that ideology. So, like many, I am left wondering every morning as I try to rally myself and my children through these school days, what is a parent to do? What is a school to do? What is a local community to do?
Taking a hard look at the larger systems mandating our daily lives and then tackling the issues that inevitably come up in those observations is a daunting task. It is sometimes easier to sit back and let things happen to us rather than stand up and fight for what we believe in, but I encourage everyone who has an opinion about our schools to speak up and demand more. In the end it is our children who suffer the consequences of our silences and our resolve. They deserve better.
Jacoby lives in Warren.
