Parent-Teacher Conferences and the Schedule From Hell

This week was completely insane.  It was parent-teacher conference week and the schedule they had us on was bizarre.

Afternoon kindergarten on a normal day runs from 12:35 until 3:15.  When Liam first started school, I thought this meant we needed to be at school for drop off no later than 12:25 so that the kids could get unloaded and then into the classroom by 12:35 to start their day.  I also thought that since they were not released from school until 3:15 that the bus would not arrive until, at earliest, 3:30.

I was wrong.

Drop off begins at 12:35 on the nose.  My child steps off the bus at our stop (which is admittedly the 3rd stop on the route) at 3:15.  This means that they do not really get down to the teaching until 12:45 and they knock off around 3:00 so that the kids can get their stuff and get on their buses.  He gets around 2 hours of instructional time a day.

You can imagine how I felt when, for three days this week, he had to be at school at 11 am and was home at 12:30.  He was barely at school long enough to turn around twice and take a pee before it was back on the bus to come home.  It was ridiculous.  I don't even know how they can get away with calling that a "full" day of school - they might as well have not gone at all.

It also messed with our lunch schedule and I was having to feed him a snack before school and lunch when he came home.  It completely threw him for a loop because he was totally unused to doing things this way.  Liam is not one to take to such schedule changes with ease.

On Wednesday, the schedule was even more crazy.  He went to school at 11:00, came home at 12:30, had 20 minutes to shove down lunch, and then we turned around and went back to school so that we could do his conference.  My neighbor and I scheduled on the same day so that we could tag team it with the childcare.  After the conference, we went to the book fair.  Then, we finally made it home.  It made for a strange day.

The good news is that he got a good report from his teacher and he's doing well in school.  I could go on and on and bore you with the details of his assessment but so far he's landing somewhere in the middle of the pack - albeit on the higher end of middle.  He's doing what he should be and that's what I'm looking for.

I'm really hoping that by the time Jamie goes to school, they'll have found a better way to go about scheduling conferences because this schedule was just dumb.