Bussing blues
For the second time in the 12 days since school started my daughter was left standing at her bus stop waiting for her schoolbus.
That's two days absent in the first two weeks of school. I've spent hours on hold waiting for transportation to take sketchy notes on the situation, today took up 20 minutes of the APs time and she said she'd spent most of her time since school started trying to straighten out the bus mess and gotten about as far as I have.
I was ready to go upstairs and sit in the Superintendent's office today and tell him my tale of woe--but there's not a damned thing he can do about it either. It has gone to the top of the totem pole in my dept though, Laura, who sits in the next cubicle to me, forwarded my emails to the school principal to the Asst. Superintendent. Not that he can do anything either.
They've had a different bus driver on that route every day, sometimes not even the same one from am to pm. She's supposed to get dropped off in the afternoon at 4:43 and it's been getting later and later--yesterday her bus showed up at 5:25. God knows when it's showing up in the morning but I know she's waiting at least 40 minutes and up to an hour. Today a neighbor waited with her--no bus. I'd never have waited that long alone on a corner in 90 degree heat. The AP told me today when I asked her point blank, how long should I tell her to wait, 30 minutes. She said she'd certainly not wait longer than that. It's a 40 minute drive home for me to leave work to pick her up and take her to school (with gas at $2.60/gal) then a 40 minutes back not including the "detour" to drop her off at school 2 hours late. I won't do it. I won't give them that easy out. "Oh mom's made other arrangements, we don't have to get our act together!"
The icing on the cake is that the school she goes to is a special program targeting unmotivated, struggling students--the misfits that fall through the cracks in a large middle school of 1500 students. These kids are targeted for dropout prevention and the transportation department is leaving kids most likely to skip school standing at bus stops mid morning for hours on end. Hell, I wasn't in that category at school and I'd still have ended up at the nearest mall given that "get out of jail free" card.
But yeah, with this going on on top of everything else falling apart around me, 2 jobs, a teenager who needs to be picked up and dropped off all over the county at a moment's notice, I have time to screencap year-old posts from my own yahoogroup and PAY for a LJ account on which to post them. Sure I do. I can't even pay my goddamned mortgage. My kids are on the free lunch program, but I'm gonna drop cash on an LJ account. My personal LJ is a free account. My photos are archived for free on photobucket. Anyone who wants a look is more than welcome.
Some folks need to get the hell over themselves and look in the freakin' mirror. Hell at least when I piss someone off I know it, I don't go skipping off thinking my shit don't stink. Look around, Sunshine. Posting anonymouse comments about me on on f_w, nah, that's not obsessive at all.