Back to school-ish

We had the back to school informational zoom yesterday and it was a bit of a shit show. It started with the burning question on everyone’s mind - what about after school care? - and for that a couple of other schools were invited to the zoom to hear from the spokesperson for Beyond the Bell, the independent service that watches the kids on the schoolyard until 6 pm. BTB is always a bit of a mess, but especially was last year when they were chronically understaffed and we all just had to cross our fingers and hope it would all work out with one staff member per 50 kids. And for the most part it was fine…I think? It’s hard when you come from a generation where kids were regularly thrown to the wolves and told to just figure their own shit out…my afterschool program was wandering the streets of NYC and being subject to every gang of marauding local kids and/or dangerous sociopath or pervert I happened to encounter…but I digress.

So basically BTB said they do not have enough staff to accommodate everyone and will only accept kids who can commit to the full week and day, as in, not be picked up until nearly 6 pm. And they told us this days before school starts when all other options are full. The parents were APOPLECTIC. It was cringey listening to everyone tear this guy apart. Oh, how I know what it feels like to be the messenger! At the same time I was confused - if you’re a working parent, isn’t it better that your kid stay as long as possible…? They also said if they got more staff they would accept kids with more flexible schedules. Which I think is definitely possible; I’ve seen it happen before. They probably waited so long to tell us because they thought they could find staff and then just couldn’t. I may soon be facing my own staffing nightmare as irreplaceable members of my staff tell me the day my event starts that they just tested positive. Fun. 

At any rate I decided right then and there to not take up two spots we don’t need and just have the kids walk home right after school instead. Until they get this mess sorted out I don’t want to use something that’s just a luxury for us and could take away from people who desperately need it. The kids are fine with it. Now I just worry they’ll come home and sit on their iPads all night, which was 100% why I had them at BTB until 4 to begin with - to get them out playing with their friends. I’m also worried about extreme heat in the middle of the day for the next couple of months - they will probably call me to pick them up a lot. I know I need to come up with some kind of schedule - you need to read for this amount of time, no iPads before this time, etc etc. But right now I’m so overwhelmed with work that the idea of deciding on and attempting to implement things of this nature sounds awful. I get tired of being the nag that’s always having to make these kids do things they don’t want to do. I guess that’s just “parenting”, though, huh? At least with the extreme heat we’ll be experiencing for the next month it shouldn’t be too hard to convince the kids to jump in the pool after school every day. School, here we come!