<p>OK, I’ll bite. Parents–what’s the most absurd thing you’ve ever had to complain about at your kids’ high school? Were you effective in getting the situation resolved???</p>
<p>An insane coach. He was from southern California and insisted kids wear jackets in cold weather. Except to Colorado kids 50-60 degrees is not cold. He still made them run laps the entire practice period. Turned off quite a few kids to his sport. The situation resolved itself: S quit the team.</p>
<p>I didn’t complain about this one, but the principal of our very large high school was definitely focused more towards athletics than academics. For an academics awards breakfast for seniors, he had certificates made up congratulating students for being named “National Merit Finalists for their Outstanding Performance on AP Tests” :eek:</p>
<p>The only one I can think of was the AP teacher who scheduled a major exam the same day as the college fair. Thanks a lot! I did complain, don’t know if it’s happened again, but the head GC did agree that it was a dumb thing to do.</p>
<p>"For an academics awards breakfast for seniors, he had certificates made up congratulating students for being named “National Merit Finalists for their Outstanding Performance on AP Tests”</p>
<p>I think for some schools these type of awards come around as often as halley’s comet. We’ve had two of the last 3 nmf at our HS in the last say 10+ years. The prinicpal for #1 was on it bigtime. We get a call in August and she’s pumped almost as jazzed as we are. We know before school starts and have to keep it secret for about 6 weeks.</p>
<h1>2 had a different principal absolutely no information whatso ever or real concern. Since we had experienced NM before, we had an idea of how things went… kept sending #2 to ask and check about it. Always told “no nothing for you…” Final straw was attending a college scholarship function and every kid in the room who was in the running for nm, had already known and completed their stuff. That monday #2 went back into the offices and was a bit more firm about it. The prinicpals personal secretary finally after several more “no it’s not here”, allowed my D to check her desk. Found it in about one minute, it had been buried for almost a month… well past the deadline for the students part and almost past the school’s part. grrrrr…</h1>
<p>New prinicpal said she handle it, because she’s dealt with them so often ;). Knew her past HS and district and nope she’d never handled it before… but she could bs with the best of em… </p>
<p>So during exams week, DD (#2) had to also slam out the nms stuff… things got in and I think nm gave some extra time… </p>
<p>We tried not to jump on anybody, but I did pass an email to the new super whom I knew and respected a nice email that said while I liked him and supported the district… if this major ball drop screws over my daugther I would have to sue the district for her education. We had a couple more communications clairifying the “worth” of a NMF title… sorta like here everyso often when people take the position of “it’s only 2500” which is of course wrong. That’s the default position, the minimum use. </p>
<p>Well everything turned out OK in the end.</p>
<p>We have several National Merit Finalists at our school every year (out of the graduating class of 750-800 students) and the guidance counselor was very on top of notifying students and having them fill out the necessary paperwork. It was just the principal who was clueless. At the same awards breakfast, students were also honored for being AP Scholars at various levels. The principal mixed all of this together in his mind and thought that the National Merit had something to do with AP tests as well.</p>
<p>A Marching Band teacher who said that his band was “like a varsity sport” and if you couldn’t “cut it” you would be cut! So much for music education!</p>
<p>…oh yeah, and my kid quit band and absolutely loves show choir! He still plays music at home and enjoys it again.</p>
<p>As a student, I had to deal at one point with a vice principal who insisted I not bring my foil to school because it was a weapon. I pointed out that I needed it for fencing, and his response then was that I would have to leave it with the coach as soon as I got to school, and that even my locker wasn’t good enough.</p>
<p>I pointed out to him that the hockey sticks, lacrosse sticks and baseball bats can all do far more significant damage to a person than a foil, which other thank poking out eyes could at most bruise someone. It took a while, but after I told him he was welcome to try and beat me up with my foil if I could try the same on him with a baseball bat, he shut up.</p>
<p>My S’s jr year HS AP Chemistry teacher…We had to purchase a $80 lab book that was used once.</p>
<p>D was kicked out of NHS for not properly completing her service form at the end of the previous school year. Students who hadn’t turned them in on time were called down & pushed to get them in. She was never contacted, so we don’t really know what she did wrong. We simply got a letter — addressed to parents, not D — telling us she was no longer a member due to not completing her service hours. I called & talked to the advisor, who said that while D had turned in the form on time, it was not filled out correctly. D was not pleased and decided she could survive senior year without being in NHS (she had sophomore & junior year to list on her apps!), so we dropped it. Funny thing is, D was given the award for Community Service at her school’s awards ceremony a few weeks later!! She took an evil pleasure in being the only summa cum laude grad not wearing the NHS collar.</p>
<p>I’m so glad someone started this post.</p>
<p>This was middle school, but I’ll go with a teacher who was routinely making fun of a child with Tourette’s in his class.</p>
<p>That is AWFUL!!! Did anyone ever get him to stop?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>It was his first year teaching. My son had really started out loving this teacher, saying he was “dynamic” and had him for three classes. About nine weeks in, I noticed a drop in his enthusiasm for the teacher. As the weeks wore on, he began to tell me about a series of issues centering on classroom mgmt. This was a class with a wide range of students – several GT kids, a few special ed kids and everything in between. I think as a new teacher he felt pressure to try to handle the issues himself and declined to write referrals for misbehavior. According to my son, many kids, special ed and GT alike, were out of control. My son said he just pulled out a book and read when it got crazy. The teacher got frustrated and took it out on the most defenseless kid.</p>
<p>Anyway, I had never complained to a teacher before. I acknowledged that I was hearing these stories through an 11yo filter, but that if even half of what my kid said was true, this is a bad situation that must be corrected and that the teacher is the adult in this scenario and has to act the part, regardless of how out of control these kids were being. I reminded him my h is a teacher as well so I understand the pressures on teachers, especially when the class is stacked with so many academic levels. Anyway, he was incredibly responsive and not defensive. He knew he’d been behaving poorly. My son said things improved dramatically. The teacher stopped being rude immediately. He began taking advantage of referrals. At midyear, the main GT trouble-maker transferred out of the class.</p>
<p>The part of this story that really ticked me off is that before I wrote the teacher I met informally with the grade-level counselor, who had met with the kids at the beginning of the year to educate them about Tourette’s. I didn’t name names but said my son had talked about a teacher who was having problems with classroom mgmt and then recounted some of the specific mean things that were being said and asked what kind of resources are available to a teacher in terms of discipline. The first words out of the counselor’s mouth was “Is S your oldest child?” and then went on about how I was just being (my words) a mother hen and that middle school teachers don’t baby children like in elementary school and that we’ll all have to toughen up. I reminded him that this teacher was not picking on my child, that I had no dog in this fight, but he was picking on a child with a disability who the counselor himself had talked to the kids about regarding the need to be understanding and kind. GRRRR.</p>
<p>Thank heavens you talked to the teacher, and even better that he responded so well. You really did him a favor, because it sounds as if he really may not have had the mentoring he should have had from the school’s administation. You helped the student, the teacher, AND the other kids in the teacher’s classes. You are an “unsung hero!”</p>
<p>I was the accompanist for the school. They hired a new music director, a relative of someone within the school, and after spending several weeks helping in the classroom, it was apparent he could <em>barely</em> read music. - a Harold Hill if there ever was one. He did not have a music degree. </p>
<p>He was only a handful of months in the country, had no employment record either in or out of this country; according to his resume he had spent his entire adulthood living with his family and being a caretaker. When I came in to help, he had me teach the class while he went into the office and did stuff on his computer. The kids told me that on my days off, they didn’t learn music. It was like I was the one who said “the emperor wears no clothes”. I felt like poison. I told administration. In the meantime, several families started coming in to the office complaining of various issues with him, culminating with two girls who (separately) reported inappropriate behavior.</p>
<p>I felt like poison. Nothing feels worse than that. Turning on a teacher, no matter what the circumstances, makes you out to be the biggest scum on earth. The only thing other teachers knew at that school, is that a teacher was fired and I had something to do with it. No matter what, people never hear the whole story- all they know is that another teacher was fired and it had something to do with <em>me</em>. If I had to do it again, I would, because I know it was the right thing to do. However, it was the crappiest school experience of my life.</p>
<p>double posted for some reason.</p>
<p>yikes, doubleplay. You know you did the right thing, but I’m sure that didn’t help you feel better about it.</p>
<p>I complained on here last year about an absurd issue we had with the “attendance Nazi” at D’s high school. D had been nominated by her GC and principal for a scholarship that required an interview at the local newspaper. D missed about an hour and a half of classes, even though she scheduled the latest possible time they would do the appointment. The “attendance nazi” was very specific in telling my daughter that she would NOT consider it an excused absence. It was purely the principal of it, but after I had an exasperating phone call with the woman, I sent a short but sweet email to the principal asking her to approve D’s absence for the scholarship SHE’d recommended her for. Needless to say, it was approved immediately. Attendance Nazi actually called me back to let me know that she’d been given “special” permission to consider the absence excused!!!</p>
<p>During DD’s junior year, her AP English teacher announced they no longer had time to take exams during class time, so everyone would be expected to come in during Directed Studies (Study Hall) or stay after school to take the exams. DD had opted to take seven classes that year with no Directed Studies period and had an after-school job, so this obviously posed a problem. Besides, DH and I thought it ridiculous. After all, the teacher had time to talk about her personal life, her part-time jobs, her three cats, her ex-boyfriend who committed suicide, etc. DH sent the teacher an e-mail telling her testing outside of class time was unacceptable. The teacher wrote back some nonsense and DH continued his argument. When he mentioned the personal facts we knew about her just from things she had mentioned to DD’s class, she suddenly realized she really did have time to test during class.</p>
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<p>Show choir was my daughter’s life in high school. Thankfully her college a cappella group is a tight-knit group that has substituted for her show choir friends. </p>
<p>However, when you throw together over a hundred co-eds on three buses and travel the kinds of travel they did, things happen. We tried to talk to the choir director about some of the things, but he would never do anything about it. You couldn’t separate the girls onto girl buses and boys onto boy buses because there were a number of gay guys in show choir. I gave up chaperoning because I felt it was a huge liability on my part, knowing that the director would not follow through with discipline, so the kids got away with things I didn’t want to have responsibility for keeping track of. </p>
<p>Onto a different complaint, in '03-'04 we got a new superintendent who instituted all kinds of new policies that were divisive and mostly his agenda for trying to turn a public school into a military school (my exaggeration of course, but this is how we was likened to). The policy that was most ridiculous was the rigidity of being reimbursed for expenses… this went across the departments. I volunteered a lot for the show choir, both in costuming and providing food on trips. We’d often have 6-8 moms show up in the evenings and on Saturdays to work on costumes. There were a lot of tweaking to do, to produce the number of costumes we did in the 4-6 months that we did. Sometimes we’d put a costume together, figure out it needed a different trim, lining, zipper, snap, etc. once we’d see the girls actually dance in them. Previous to the new superintendent, we used to take it upon ourselves to run up to the local fabric store to buy a few different styles of zippers or trim, etc. to see how they’d look. We’d present the receipt to the choir director, he’d submit to the business office and you knew you’d always be reimbursed. The choir director had his own budget, and knew what he had to spend for the year, and kept track of it as we made little purchases along the line. New superintendent comes in and says the business office will no longer work this way, that if you have a purchase need, you go to the store where you will be buying it, get a purchase order from them showing what you’re buying and how much it is, submit that to the business office, then they would cut a check directly to the store for the price. I think they cut checks once a week or every two weeks. So imagine you’re in the middle of reworking a dress, and you have an idea which will make making all these dresses more efficient (will save the department money), but you have to make a prototype. Under the new guidelines, we’d have to go to the store, get a purchase order, submit it to the school, then wait for a check to be cut, finally returning to the store, up to two weeks later to make the purchase (which could be less than $5). Add in what happens between the time you get the purchase order and the time you return to the store for the purchase: maybe the item was on sale when you saw it first, and by the time you get back, it’s not on sale. Or it’s not on sale, and now is… your check is for the wrong amount. Sometimes we’d know we needed something (like lots of blue thread) and would wait for it to go on sale (not knowing when it would) to purchase it (or someone would come up with a coupon). We’d end up paying more for items because we had to buy them when they weren’t on sale because by the time we’d get a check cut, the sale would be over.</p>
<p>I remember being at a school board meeting one year a couple of weeks before homecoming. The student body president pleaded with the business manager to allot them some money (that was already included in the budget)so that they could go to the party store and buy decorations. What they bought would be determined by what was cheaper, what themed stuff they could get, etc. The business manager told them they had to go get a purchase order from the store (streamers, balloons, etc., everything you’d need to decorate a gym for a dance), submit it, and have a check cut. I’m suspecting in the two week difference time, sone of the stuff they wanted to purchase might not be there, so then what do they do with a check that is the wrong amount (and stores would not hold merchandise for them)? Every… little… thing… someone needed to purchase required a purchase order. So to get around it, different EC groups began to create their own booster clubs that had money in them, and were held at a bank not affiliated with the school. So whenever someone needed a few dollars here and there, they could buy something and submit the receipt to the program sponsor.</p>
<p>I used to be in charge of two car wash fundraisers every summer, and would provide cups/water/lemonade/ice for the kids. Sometimes a hose would get a bad enough leak that we’d have to run out quickly and buy a new hose. How do you budget for that to an exact amount three weeks in advance? You can’t. </p>
<p>Of course this was just a symptom of a much larger problem… meaning our school board and the superintendent they hired. He lasted three years (still had two years left on his contract when he finally resigned), and only a year and a half after all the incumbent board members were voted off for supporting this guy.</p>
<p>However, I will say, we were <em>lucky</em> enough to have fireworks at our football games each time our team scored points (and believe me, we didn’t score that often, but the superintendent - a good old boy from Oklahoma who thought football was everything - thought if he got the team and crowd worked up with fireworks, they might be more motivated; they ended up being totally embarassed). Somehow they budgeted just the right amount for each game… although I do have to say once the whole community got wind that our school was shooting off fireworks at football games, the pressure came down hard, and I think it only lasted three games. Of course when we needed to pass a referendum the following spring, all the community could think of was, well, if they have enough money to buy fireworks, they must not need any more of my tax money.</p>
<p>Yea, there was a LOT of conflict going on those three years… lots of heated school board meetings. He’s been gone a year and a half, and they still have a long way to go to recover from all the policies he recommended and got the incumbent school board to pass.</p>