For all the people saying that Lorax should be able to get a waiver, that may not be the last of it. Hospitals require waivers, too, and they get sued. From what I understand, and IANAL, so perhaps one of those could chime in, waivers are pretty well useless. No matter what Lorax signs or doesn’t sign, the law or rule or policy is written somewhere, and facts are that the school has to follow them. If s/he can sign a waiver, then it may not even be worth as much as the paper it’s written on, to the school, because it may not be legally binding in all or most cases. I’d be calling the school district, personally, to talk with someone beyond the principal, because usually these policies are not school specific.
No, thats the Rhode Island drivers.
State is too small for them to correctly learn how to drive…
I got lost every day for a week when I first started walking home 6 blocks until I finally figured out how streets work (I’ll start another thread for anyone that wants to know the secret). But back then we didn’t hear stories of 11 year old girls getting abducted from their front yard only to resurface 18 years later with two daughters as a result of almost two decades of rape.
This is true. In Rhode Island you will see some shit. Refining my driving skills there left me able put Michigan passengers an abject terror.
Still not as bad as Mass drivers.
And we don’t hear stories of 11 year old girls being abducted, etc. today, either. Only one. The most dangerous person, in terms of crimes committed against a child, remains one of the child’s own parents. And further out into other members of the family, then close friends and neighbors. Stranger danger, especially the danger of abduction, is vastly overstated and overhyped. Statistically speaking, there is about a 1,000,000% higher chance of little Cindy getting diddled by daddy than snatched away in broad daylight (or dark of night) by Scary Strange Kidnapping Fiend.
Yeah, but the thing is, the kid is more likely to be raped by the person signing them in and out of school than (s)he is likely to be abducted by a religious rapist nutbag. It’s a stupid rule and they have no business telling her when her child is ready for unsupervised walking.
I’d have half a mind to sign the kid out, tell him to stand there for 5 minutes, run ahead of him, and greet him at the door…you know, just to show them how stupid their rule is.
Is this sign-out thing common in US schools? Because that alone sounds seriously whacked to me … never mind comparisons with the 60s and 70s, I know for sure nobody’s keeping tabs on the kids at my daughter’s primary school after the last bell goes (except for the littlies in the first few weeks of their school career. And even then we didn’t have to sign anything)
Surely other parents get annoyed at the waste of time too? What if you ALL just walked out of the hall with your kids one day? That would be something.
^This. I walked about a mile by myself between 5 and 6. The only danger was getting into fights with other kids from school. When I was 6 and entered elementary/middle school (not sure of the exact term, I live in the Netherlands) I biked 4 miles back and forth with some school mates every day unless the weather was exceptionally bad. Before anyone gets outraged, keep in mind that in the Netherlands biking as a lot more common so other road users know how to handle bikes on the road.
This was the early 80s, by the way.
When I was in school in rural CA 30 years or so ago, once we left the school we were no longer their problem. Of course back then we could stay on the property and play volleyball or basketball or run the track, etc even if it wasn’t a school event. And ride our bikes around the playground and get this… THERE WERE NO GATES!! :eek: Yep, we just strolled right up into the school and went pretty much wherever we wanted.
I am the Lorax: I may have missed this but what do the drivers have to do? Do they sign the kids out or do the kids just go running up to the waiting car? What about the bussers? Do they have to get signed for by a parent when the bus drops them off?
The parents who drive to pick thier kids up have to park and come in and sign them out. Bussers don’t have to be signed for when they are dropped off. I pick my five year old daughter up from the bus at the end of the block everyday, not because I think she’s too young to walk home, but because I don’t trust her to come right home. She’s a little wildcat.
I don’t think so - at least it’s not common here. My kids were considered walkers, and I never had to go sign them out from school. They just, you know… left. And walked home.
What a huge waste of time and resources.
Oh, this reminds me of something else too. What sort of lame-ass school system has “no room” for a little girl whose brother is going to the school already AND who lives right around the corner? Is this a public or a private school? Round here, if it was a state school they’d have to suck it up and make room.
I can see you walking him the first week. But after that, yeah…
I walked to school by myself, three blocks, when I was that age. Lots of other kids, quiet residential neighborhood. Unless your 'hood has some specific danger the school knows about, they sound overprotective.
To be fair, there was a slightly busier street midway through, & I was tiny so I couldn’t see over the parked cars, so I would go into the street & look around them to see if a car was coming (I don’t know why I didn’t just go on sound…). The one time there was one close, I tried to jump back, was too late, & got a broken femur. Six weeks in traction. I don’t know who paid for it, probably the driver’s insurance.
So, considering the cost of health care these days…Does your state have mandatory liability insurance?
Granted, I’m not aware of that happening to anyone else.
I don’t think its common - I think our school secretary would have fits if it were ever implemented here. By the end of the day as it is she looks in need of a stiff drink.
I do need to send a note if anything other than what is usual is supposed to happen “My child will be going home with Matt today and riding his bus.” “I’ll be picking my child up at 3:00 for a dentist appointment.” I have to sign them in and out if its outside normal hours.
There are somewhere around 700-800 kids in our elementary school. If I have to pick them up at the end of the day, its a zoo between buses and walkers and pick ups - even without signout (I really try not to pick them up at the end of the day - they usually take the bus. But once in a while there is the “need to get somewhere quickly” day.
Timely article in the Sunday NY Times.
I especially like the story of the ten year old allowed to walk a mile to soccer practice. Apparently, this was sufficiently frightening that a number of neighbors saw him and called 911, and he was picked up by the cops, and parents admonished. Ten, not three, he was ten.
I suspect that they are less worried about maniac child molesters and more worried about getting sucked into the middle of custody disputes. It’s not at all uncommon these days for a kid with divorced parents to really live with both–bedrooms at both houses, sleeping 4 nights a week at mom’s and 3 nights a week at dad’s. If the parents also hate each others guts and are in a constant state of passive-aggressive war with each other, it’s very easy to get pulled into a clusterfuck: Dad thinks he gets Johnny on Wednesday because Mom took “his” Saturday so he picks Johnny up from school and then mom throws a fit and blames the school. Rinse and repeat. Normally sane and rational people become utterly crazy in these situations, so you can’t just depend on people to be reasonable.
This isn’t a theoretical thing for the schools, like stranger kidnappings–I’d bet good money they have one or two very painful incidents a year when they get pulled into some sort of raging custody dispute (“How dare you not call me and let me know Suzie didn’t bring milk money when she came from her mom’s house last week?!”), and I am sure there are any number of files with notes like “Do not give information to Stepmother unless father is present” or “All communication with mother must be duplicated with father”. It’s the sort of thing that leads to making blanket PITA, CYA policies like sign-outs.
This. A waiver is not a guarantee that you won’t sue; it’s simply a piece of paper that the school can hold up in its own defense if you do sue. The cost of a civil trial is not reduced just because you’re going to win, and even if you signed the waiver in front of a notary in your own blood, it probably wouldn’t be enough to win the school a summary judgment.
That means the school will have to settle your lawsuit, because even if they have a 90% chance of prevailing, you’ll probably get a million bazillion dollars if you do win, from a sympathetic (okay, retarded) jury composed of equally squeamish parents.
While this is quite true it is also somewhat beside the point. What frightens people is not the rational percent chance of danger, but rather certain nightmare scenarios. For example, it is obvious that the greatest danger in going for a swim in the sea is going to be, statistically, the car drive on the way to the seaside, not being eaten by a shark - but I’m pretty sure more are scared of the (nearly nonexistent) threat of the latter than that of the former.
Obviously parents are not going to be scared by the threat they themselves pose for the child on a statistical basis, since they presumably know their own minds and know that they, personally, are not a threat (though some will be deluding themselves, mistaken in their choice of partners, etc).
Thing is, having a kid snatched and murdered by strangers is every parent’s worst nightmare - only roughly equivalent, for swimmers, of the proverbial Great White Shark attack, since the vast majority of parents would infinitely prefer being eaten by sharks to having their kids snatched - a parent can well imagine the nightmare of waiting for the kid to come home, the ineffectual searches, the hopes roused only to be dashed, the not knowing, the dreadful eventual discovery …
And while its percent chance of actually happening is very low on an individual basis, it does happen frequently enough to make the news reasonably regularly as a front page item - unlike (say) death by car accident, which only gets more than purely local attention if it is spectacular.
People, it would seem, do not use the purely logical calculation of harm times percentage chance of occurance in forming their motivations. Some harms, while extremely unlikely, are rated as more frightening because they are more terrible. For a parent, having a child abducted by evil strangers is right at the top in terms of scare.
Sometimes I’d look at my late grandfather and think, man,with all the technological and social changes, you must feel like you’ve been taken by aliens to a different world… now I feel a lot like that myself.
One can imagine that quite a few parents in the past have signed waivers for any number of things, only to proceed and sue ANYWAY because “that was not what I was thinking about when I signed, I had no choice but to sign or deprive my child, any reasonable person would assume you still were responsible, hey something bad happens = someone has to pay, etc., etc.” The thing is, a citizen CAN’T completely sign away their right to go to court; you DON’T want a system where that can be done, anyway.