Tim and I both work full-time, until 5:00. School gets out at 3:20. As such, Big Brother needs after-school care for a couple of hours four days a week (I’m off on Fridays).
Last year, our school district offered affordable after-school care, as I believe it has for a long time. (BB was in kindergarten last year, so that was our first year with the district.) The child care kids took the bus to the middle school, where they had a snack, played games, read in the library, swam on Tuesdays, had Tae Kwon Do on Thursdays, etc. BB loved it, and the $9 per day fee was affordable.
School starts in two weeks, and I’ve been desperately trying to find out how to register for child care this year so that I can get it taken care of and know that he’s settled for after-school care BEFORE the first day of school. (Registration last year was a disaster, resulting in a phone call the first day saying they had BB but didn’t have any record of him.) I couldn’t find anything on the district’s web site, and e-mail/voice-mails to various people in the district had proven fruitless. In fact, they were ignored until today.
Today, I e-mailed the (new) superintendent of schools. Her assistant e-mailed me back about the child care program about an hour ago.
And guess what. You probably guessed right – they’ve discontinued the child care program because it was “cost prohibitive.” (Huh? You charge 30+ kids $9 for two hours, pay two workers probably $9/hr each for those same two hours, and that’s cost prohibitive? The middle school is open anyway, it’s not like they’re lighting the whole school for the child care kids.)
I am absolutely furious. Not simply because that leaves us without child care TWO WEEKS before school starts, though that is a big problem and I have no idea how we’re going to resolve it. I don’t even know of any neighborhood kids he could potentially go home with for a couple of hours after school.
The part that is really pissing me off right now is that the ONLY reason they told me that child care is canceled this year is because I made a pain of myself – not because they had the courtesy to let the child care parents know that the care they were counting on is no longer available. The other parents probably don’t even know yet. Tim and I are lucky because our bosses are both flexible and if, for some reason, we find ourselves still without care for the first week or so, it can be worked around. But surely most other parents aren’t so lucky. What if they work in a factory? Or a bank? Or someplace else where they can’t leave a couple of hours early, or bring their kid to work with them for an hour or so, or whatever.
This is not the first problem we’ve had with the schools, and BB is on the waiting list for two of the local charter schools (#16 on one list and #8 on the other). We received a letter from each the other day, indicating that there would be some kind of “second chance” enrollment lottery on the first day of school (i.e. after school has already started). I was debating about whether to even bother once BB had already started at his previous school, but now there is no doubt. Tim and I WILL be at those “second chance” lotteries to get the best chance of getting BB into one of those schools.
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