Homework is getting a little out of hand lately, and I’m not talking about the kids. Each school day my girls come home with things that need to be filled out, signed, read, noted and paid for. It usually takes me more time to look through the daily stack than the girls take to do their homework.
June is especially a very busy month as we are receiving information about the next school year as well as final fieldtrips and about activities coming to an end. In the past week I have written over a dozen checks for one thing or another and paid out a pretty good chunk of change.
My hand actually cramped up on me the other day I had so many different things to sign and go through. I’m not sure why but every single piece of work the girls complete requires a signature regardless of marks. I sign my name so often now that my signature has become an illegible scrawl.
Most of the fees I’ve paid for in the past few weeks are relatively small amounts but they do eventually start to add up. E as a patrol and in her final year has more than most years as they have “grad”, camp and patrol activities in addition to class ones.
For the most part I’m not greatly irritated by all of it, I want my girls to be able to enjoy all the extras and to do that we are going to have to pay sometimes. It does sometimes feel like one child or the other is constantly in need of money however.
The only fees that actually irritate me outright are the ones paid to what is optimistically called the lunch program. 90% of the actual lunch supervision is in fact supplied by the grade 6 patrols and “conflict managers”. The adult supervisors are most often found standing around together chatting with one another completely oblivious to the kids around them.
I was happy that E being in Junior high would no longer need to pay for lunch program when I realized we now have to rent a band instrument, pretty much the same fee that lunch program was. At least I get something for my money, most likely a headache.
12 more school days left then 2 whole months without homework, hurray!
