Physical or logical delete…
I can’t stop, stand, or park but it is a place to drop off students… Say what? Am I supposed to do a slow drive-by and throw the kid out the window or what? Who do the public schools have writing this crap nowadays and who approves it? Probably some idiot who uses “Dude!” in their regular conversation. “Dude! it’s okay, my parents threw me out the window at the elementary school and I landed on my head but I’m okay.” Sigh.
I walked my kids to this school 99% of the time they attended it (except when they were old enough to walk themselves). It would’ve been ridiculous for me to drive them to school because, to walk to the school, we go out the door, down the block, hang a left, and we’re in the school yard. Driving them to school is about a mile. People did that. I do not know why. If I ever drove a vee-hickle around the end of the earth and back to that school, it was because I had a bunch of crap to haul over there (or take home). The proximity of the elementary school is one of the reasons that we bought the Landfill all those years ago. It is on the same block as an elementary school and so our kids did not have to cross streets to get there.
There have always been parking lot issues over there at that school. It is the same age (59 years) as my old school in Sault Ste. Siberia, good old [stinkin’] Lincoln. Almost everybody walked to Lincoln School, even some of the teachers, probably. The parking lot was gravel and maybe, I dunno 10 or 15 vee-hickles parked there on an average day. I lived across the street and so I certainly walked but even if I was staying at my Grandma’s house, maybe 10 blocks away, I walked.
Our school here in A2? Oh man.. Kids get droven (intentionally misspelled) in from everywhere. There are kids who get bused in from outlying areas and I can understand why their parents drive them on days when time is tight and there’s something else to do. But I have never figured out why folks in my own neighborhood drove their kids to school. Having every blasted perfectly coiffed soccer mom (stereotype warning) drop their kids off at school every day makes a mess in the parking lot. And that makes the school (and the district) have to spend all kinds of money (aka taxpayer dollars) to deal with traffic patterns and flows and parking spaces and yada yada. None of this crap has anything to do with educating students.
November 18th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Slow to 20, tuck and roll.
November 19th, 2009 at 12:28 am
I took the bus and walked to the bus stop which was several hills away. I did this in rain, snow, sleet–whatever Washingtonian weather was throwing out. My parents had a car for dad for work and a car for mom. If I took the car to school, mom didn’t have any transportation. Now the bus stops about every block to pick up oversized, spoiled and sue-happy kids. Sad times.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Aww, Jay beat me to the quote, (said in jest), from our house.
Our house was on the very corner of the boundary line for our elementary school, but I think it was just under the 1-mile limit for bus service, so we walked. I walked to school in Grand Rapids too, and that seemed like a long way to go, but hey, I was only there for kindergarten and first. We walked to Slauson, at the other end of our block. We walked to Pioneer, which was a mile and a half away. We did not get our ears frost-bitten, although Harry did once, when he walked to Pioneer. Three cheers for long hair, and for Dad working in a different location when we walked to high school! We, for Slauson and Pioneer was Jay and I. Jane will have to chime in on her experiences getting to Forsyth and Huron.
November 19th, 2009 at 9:12 am
ahem. I went to Tappan. and walked or rode my bike. I recently lived half a block from Slauson. There was a traffic jam every morning with parents dropping their kids off. If I left at the wrong time I was out of luck just trying to pull away from the curb. And the kids who were walking to school had to be careful crossing the street — because of all the traffic!
November 19th, 2009 at 10:22 am
I was gonna say, “I think Jane went to Tappan,” but then I had to go through that daily neck-breaking exercise of falling out the front door with a couple laptops, an extra jacket, lunch, phone, keys, purse, whatever.
It is a 1-1/2 mile limit for busing (I think) but nowadays there are a lot of “safety” busing situations, which means a lot of kids within that limit get bused anyway. I bet that wasn’t true when you guys went to school here.
November 20th, 2009 at 8:44 am
BRAIN FREEZE! Thanks for correcting me, Jane and KW, it was Tappan. I was visualizing the right location, just the wrong name.
When our school district here is talking about budget cuts, I sometimes think they ought to stop bussing non-handicapped kids to the middle school and high school. I voiced this opinion once, and one of the teachers said, “We don’t want to give the students any more reasons for not getting to school!”