High School Blues

I have been MIA for the past couple of days. I wish I could say that I was involved is some wonderful, exciting, relaxing events, but none of that for me. Instead I have been dealing with a fiasco that is called Jared was registered for the wrong high school.

Here is how it all came to be. Last spring some evil, sadistic educators came to the middle school and touted the joys of magnet schools. One particular school named Rancho has an aviation program. In this program you could take flying lessons and graduate from High School with a pilots license, or something like that. This all sounds good and wonderful. The problem I have with it, is that it is about 30 minutes away in a not so great part of town. There is a bus to the school, but if Jared was going to attend seminary, I would need to drive him every day. That was the real deal breaker for me. How sad I would deny my son an educational opportunity due to my limitations. But there you have it.

The other thing is that he has about 6 great friends here in the ward, so why not go to high school with your best friends. Also the high school here is 1 mile from our house, easily walking distance once Jared recovers. Also seminary is at our ward building 1/2 mile from my house. So it just made sense to me that he would just attend our local school. Yes he would miss out on being a pilot, but surely he could still do this sometime in the rest of his life, right? And who knows what kind of friends he would make there, when he already has really great, nice friends with the same values.

Let me also say, that Jared on his own initiative filled out the application online. I had nothing to do with it. I crossed my fingers that he would not get in, because it is a lottery kind of a thing. So back in April, Rancho sent us a letter saying that Jared was accepted into the aviation program. Curses. I hoped it wouldn't come to that. We then sent in the letter accepting their acceptance. I still figured that we could change our minds.

In May when it was time to register at our high school, Spring Valley, we filled out the registration form. In the mean time Rancho sent us a packet and we did not send it back or register with them. Also I failed to read in it where it said please notify ASAP if you decide not to attend.

Go figure that I never called Rancho. The month of June was spent recovering from the school year and preparing for scout camp. And somehow making that call never occured to me during all my countless hours at the hospital in July.

I assumed incorrectly that Jared was now registered at Spring Valley. That was the only school that we actually turned in a class schedule to. My first clue that something was wrong, was Sunday night when all of his friends received a call from their seminary teachersm Jared, bubkas. Then on Monday, we received a bus stop assignment to go to Rancho. This was a major red flag. Yikes. So Tuesday, I went to Spring Valley and sure enough he was not in their system. Oh, Dear. Next, I called Rancho and they were able to take him out of their system. Then Spring Valley told me that I needed to register Jared as a new student. Holy Bureaucracy, Batman. This involved bringing my power bill and drivers license in. At that point there were about 50 people waiting, so I opted to come in right at 7 am on Wednesday morning.

As planned yesterday, I woke up at 6:30 and went to the school. I was third on the list, not bad. I only waited for about 10 minutes. It was the teachers first day back at school and things were pretty crazy. I tried to go and talk to the counselor, but she was completely swamped. The other bad thing is that they completely dropped Jared from all of the classes that he registered to take. Curses again.

Because I couldn't talk to anyone. I ran over to the pediatrician and picked up the doctors note talking about Jared's limitations. Then I went back to the school and had a very good talk with the nurse. She is on board with helping him. Once he has teachers, she will e-mail them and let them know that if Jared gets to tired in class, he will be allowed to come to the nurses office and lay down for a while. If he feels better, then he can go back to his next class, if not then they will call me. The nurse was willing to meet with me and the counselor to help get his schedule arranged with classes as close to each other as possible. Hopefully that will happen today.

After all that at the school, I went to institute at 9:30 and got Jared registered in seminary. So that was all good. I think that most of his problems are solved. It is just getting his classes set up. And that can even happen next week.

I think especially given all that Jared has been through, I would have made him change back to the high school so close to my house. It will be comforting to know that he is only a mile away, if he has any problems.

It will be very interesting to see how he is going to handle sitting at school for 6 hours. He is doing better every day. Tuesday night he went to a swim party for mutual. He did pretty well at that. Today he went with Marion into his school. And last Sunday he went to all three hours of church. The more he gets out the better it is. He is really sick of being stuck in the house. Tonight there is a freshman open house.

This was probably pretty boring and long winded. Maybe something entertaining will happen today.