Today I am slightly annoyed....

The lad brought a letter home from school yesterday. It informed us that the school has been given 150 young trees to plant in their grounds, and they would be grateful if any parent with a spade and some time would come and lend a hand.

Great I thought, I'm up for that, and I have some spare holiday entitlement, so I told the wife to find out at the earliest opportunity when this was going to happen. So she asked at the school this morning. They are doing it tomorrow afternoon.

This is about the 3rd time in less than a year that they've sprung something on us without anything like sufficient notice. I wish the head teacher would learn the simple concept of giving people advanced notice. She must think nobody else has a job.

 

I might do a polite letter. No point in anyone falling out over it, but she has to be told that while there will be times when its impractical to give a week's notice, most of the time it is kind of expected as the norm that people's work commitments will be taken into account when planning anything.

 

I used to get cross that the school would arrange a trip & then expect you to pick the kids up in the middle of the night on a weekday. Oblivious to the fact that some of us might be going to work at 5.30 in the morning.

They've probably been given 150 Ash trees that the nursery can't sell at the moment.

 

Fair play FC

I had 2 of them there at the same time, no sooner had I paid for one to go to France, th e other one was off to Spain

 

They just don't care about it FC. If you don't cough up the money its the kids that get the stigma. Just had to bite the bullet & write the cheques out.

Then there was the embarrasing time they didn't cash one for months & when they did it bounced So I got clobbered more than the trip cost by the bank & still had to find the money to pay the school.

 

They must all be the same
Both my married daughters are in their own private bought homes, but although they look like Swans on the surface, below decks they are struggling to keep their heads up

So Grandad (moi) tries to foot the constant requests from school for cash
Latest was a trip to France to see the battlefields, Then yesterday an organised Ski-ing Trip, and a planned trip to Germany in Feb and that is just the 15 year old Oh along with music lessons and a piano,
Next eldest a trip to Disneyland France,

I think like school dinners, those on benefits get to go free Gratis

Jack McH

 

I remember early on in the yr we got a letter about a friut/veg bed the school was doing for the kids to learn along with healthy eating which i thought was brilliant
so i asked if they needed anything and dropped them some of my strawberry plants off,a few week after i asked jessie how the plants were doing and they hadnt even got round to planting them yet Then approx a month later when they had i had to send netting up for them which i should of done with the plants at 1st
A month ago i got a news letter and slip to be signed asking if my child wanted to join a gardening club(end of summer great idea) that they were starting,why didnt they start the club back in may,then maybe the blinking plants would of been planted


So clueless,maybe them trees will still be there for the planting next month if our schools anything to go by!
Maybe if you ring them and ask what their plan is,if they dont have enough people to help(with such short notice) and they have marked spots for the trees then you could offer some help over weekend if maybe the caretaker is there or willing to open up for parents that work all week,it only takes a text message from them to parents to offer that option x

 

Not really true or fair Zigs. I spent 28 years as a headteacher, admittedly in school in a fairly affluent area, and managed to maintain what might be regarded as a 'slush fund' that was used to help parents who couldn't afford school trips and sometimes school meals. I didn't make it generally known, but I did know what families were, or might be struggling, and would have a word on the QT to let them know that the school would provide support. Like I say my school was in a fairly affluent area and there are many schools where such support probably wouldn't be possible.

Although things have improved vastly over the last 10 years or so, schools are not lavishly provided with finance from local or national funds and what they can raise themselves can make a significant difference to the quality of education they provide.

A year so so before I retired I worked out that the money my school had to provide all educational supplies for the children (books, stationery, computers, musical instruments, gymn equipment etc) was the equivalent of one Mars Bar per day per child.

 

The lad's school has a 'slush fund' (if I understand what that is correctly). Its a great idea. There's a fair few skint families have kids in the school down the road, its catchment area takes in one of the poorest parts of town.

To be honest, I believe that the school currently gets a bit more money out of me than they need for my son. Not a lot, but a bit. They take a weekly small fee for the kids to have a drink and a snack mid morning, and I think that weekly fee is probably double what it costs them. I don't mind one bit though. At the end of the day, if I was flat broke and couldn't afford to pay, I'd hate for my son to miss out and wonder why he didn't get some of the treats the other kids got, so I'd hate for someone else's son or daughter to feel that way too. We all hit hard times sooner or later after all.

 

I dont mind school asking for anything,im not rich by no means but school photos prices wind me up,£10 for 1 pic!!!I dont know its the same for others maybe its the company they use here but ive never purchased one in 3 yrs for that rip off reason which i think is a shame for jessie as she will prob ask me why one day 'wheres my school photos'
sorry for moaning x

 

Yes, we've just been stung about £30 for a set of photos. The thing is, they don't even do a class photo these days it seems, so what's the point of the school photo? The fun of them is to look at them and try to pick out your mates from when they were 10.

 

Is the answer to scrap all school trips and extracurricular activities? There'd be no requests for cash then.

Presumably clueless's HT didn't want the same fate to befall the 150 saplings, hence the last minute call for help. Sometimes you can't win.

Regarding school gardening: much of it is going to depend on reliable voluntary help, which may or may not be available, and a knowledgeable and committed person to direct operations . Also, HTs are under pressure to be seen to tick the "Growing food" box. They do not always have any expertise where gardening is concerned and don't realise there are no quick fixes. So they may have requested plants without thinking about what they were, how they needed to be cared for and who was going to organise and do the work. I'm not condoning this, but I know it happens.

Autumn is a good time for children to do gardening - they can make compost, plant bulbs, take Irishman's cuttings, do watering and sow some seeds. Also do a little bit of weeding and maintenance, though this is tricky without close supervision as they pull up the wrong things.

May is also good but bear in mind that all work has to be completed and sent home before the term ends as you cannot have a lot of young plants being planted in mid-July or left in a greenhouse unless there is someone able and willing to water them regularly during the holidays. Also, if children are very young they need a lot of help to plant things properly mainly because their hands are not strong enough to dig unaided unless the soil is light - but they should have been able to manage a few strawberry plants. Sowing seeds and making cuttings is more manageable for very young children.

If they had started a gardening club this May most of the meetings would have been rained off anyway.