Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Schools are pants.

I've had Sam on the phone from school twice today. Firstly, we agreed he could take guitar lessons. I gave him the form and cheque straight away, but he couldn't find the music teacher to give it to her, and the office wouldn't take it. He finally found the teacher today who told him he was too late, all the guitar lessons are fully booked, as are the piano and drums. All they had left was trombone. He has no interest in learning that. So he was a bit gutted, I think.

Secondly, the school has a system for lunches. Every child has a credit card type thing. You send your child in with coins, which they load into a machine. It puts the amount of money onto the card and they use this to pay for lunches. On the first day of school the machine wasn't working properly. Everyone put their money in (£4.50 for Sam) but the machine didn't register it. Sam later put another £10, and some more money this week. But he phoned me today to say that there was only 12p left on his card. I phoned the office to ask what has happened to all his money and they told me that on the first day any money put in didn't go onto the cards properly. Instead of telling the children this, so that we could rectify it, they just left it. It will get sorted if and when parents realise that the child has no money. How crazy. Half the parents won't realise it's happened and the catering company will have made a small fortune!

Edit - Steve has managed to organise guitar lessons with a friend of his who lives next to the school. This guy has offered to do them for free as he wants to start teaching guitar and will use Sam as a sort of guinea-pig to see how it goes. So that's good news! He's a nice guy too, and plays in a gospel band. Excellent news. Sam will be pleased.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am soooooooo glad my children are all grown up. I remember such situations with kids occuring on a daily basis with one or other of you girls. It caused major stress as there always seemed to be something. When will schools ever get themselves together and realise that kids are people worthy or respect, dignity and consideration? It makes my BLOOD BOIL!

Anonymous said...

The school dinner machine sounds like quite a good idea if they can actually get it working. When I was at school they had dinner vouchers which cost £20 for a book. I always spent the money on buying records, so although I had a great music collection, I finished up severely under-nourished.

Anonymous said...

I hate those vending cards. We have them at work for the staff restaurant but it's pants cos the smallest you can put on it is 50p and you never want to put more than a fiver on in case you lose your card (it's very easily done I can tell you!) so you have to have a constant supply of pound coins, to the point where sometimes you buy something with a £20 note just to get change for your lunch. Which in my opinion is just bizarre!!!

Anonymous said...

Thank goodness they don't have those cards at Ja dn M's school, what a nightmare!

Glad you managed to get the guitar lessons sorted out.

Anonymous said...

I guess it's not just the schools here that are awful. Looks like things worked out for the better as far as the guitar lessons though. Have they figured out the cards?

Tammy