The Assembly that Almost Wasn’t

The boy had an assembly the other morning. It was a science related presentation with two dancers who described various “motion” related concepts. The name of the act is “Locomotion” and apparently they’re a pretty well known act- they’ve been on some of the morning shows. The performance was interesting as they introduced simple things like wheels, levers and gyroscopes (which isn’t necessarily simple, but it makes for a neat thing to show to elementary kids), all done to the time of a catchy tune. The boy enjoyed it.

At this point, you might be curious as to why I have such intimate knowledge of the performance. Simple. Because I was there with the boy to watch it.

Why?

Well, that’s the interesting part. The performance was scheduled for the morning. For those not paying attention, the boy has afternoon kindergarten. So, in a nutshell, he was SOL. In fact, it was fluke that the Wife figured out that the assembly was happening at all and realized that he was not going to get a chance to see it. Of course, what that really meant was NONE of the afternoon kindergarteners would get to see it.

So the Wife started by contacting the boy’s teacher asking for a schedule of the remaining assemblies as well as an explanation for why the afternoon kids weren’t getting an opportunity to see the assembly as well. The teacher responded by saying something to the effect that the schedule was not known until the last minute and that afternoon kids would have some opportunities that the morning kids would not, though she didn’t have any examples to support this assertion.

The Wife next contacted the president of the PTO- ultimately resulting in a response from the school saying that the assembly was open to everyone, but parent’s of afternoon school-goers would have to bring their kids to the assembly. As it turns out, there are a number of assemblies that will play out this way(offered in the morning, not the afternoon) and the afternooner’s would have missed out on all of them. Additionally, the school is now looking into scheduling afternoon sessions for the remaining presentations.

Being a PUBLIC school, I’m amazed that it took a parent to point out the problem. While I give the school credit for correcting the error forthrightly, I just don’t understand how it could have been allowed to happen by professional educators in the first place. The Wife pointed out that all of the kids of PTO parents were in the morning session, none are in the afternoon, and since the event was sponsored by the PTO, the schedulers probably just never thought about the afternoon kids. If this is the case (and I’m not saying it is- however plausible it may be) then the error is more egregious in my view as it becomes a clear case of small-time political favoritism.

The good thing is that it all worked out and the boy enjoyed getting a chance to watch the show. But you can bet we’ll be keeping an eye out for other errors by our school administrators. Only 12 more years to go…