Wishin for a rubber stamp.....................

That I could put my signature on for all the paperwork that is coming home aready from the school. The first official day is not until September fourth.

Cross country started yesterday, and I am already out a hundred and twenty bucks. In our district they managed to get "pay to play" voted in. This means that I have to pay a fee for my daughter to participate in a sport. I would have no problem with this except for one thing, two things really. The first is that the athletic budget already far exceeds the drama or other artistic type activities. In addition, when (if actually, I really don't go to watch her run. I wouldn't mind cross country, but track forget it. The darn meets last ALL day and your kids runs maybe three minutes of that time, of course once in the beginning and then once you never know when so you have to hang around the whole time. I can handle the bad mother looks I get from other parents, as my kid is okay with the fact that I choose not to go.) they have home meets, people are charged like eight bucks to get into the events, even parents. Don't you think they could at least let parents in to watch their kid participate? No, can't do that, we have to use that money to spend a hundred thousand dollars a year on an athletic director, who earns his money by sitting around thinking up ways to get parents to pay more fees and then how to get the millage increased so we can have a second gym, just for varsity practice. Maybe, if we had a school with several thousand kids in it, but this is small town USA, and what we have is just fine.
Okay! So I still have issues with the way the public school spends my tax dollars. I am always sure to vote at every election so I get to bitch about things as much as I want.

But seriously, wouldn't it be great if you could stamp your signature as many times as you have to sign on the dotted line at the beginning of the school year. This year I discovered two new things. The first is according to the "No child left behind initiative" (at least in high school) your child's name must be given to the military recruiters UNLESS you put it in writing WITHIN THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF SCHOOL that you do not want their name released. If anyone reading this sees the wisdom in this one, please share with me. I get enough junk mail and junk phone calls without having recruiters calling the house. They have (way to many in my opinion) great comercials and I would bet money that every kid in public school watches television and sees those commercials and could figure out how to find an office to sign up in without having the public school release their name. I also know for a fact that recruiters hang out at malls and talk to kids and give them gifts and lots of promises to get them to sign up. That is enough exposure for me thank you very much.

I also said no to some other list (that they supposedly watch very carefully) of companies that they give students names out to, unless they get my specific permission every time they want to release her name. If she scored points for her team and they want to put her name in the paper fine. If they want her to participate in a marketing project, forget it.

There is one bright light in all of this. Now that she has her own check book, I have made one mass deposit, and she can just write her own checks out as she needs them thoughout the year. Once April gets here, she can sign everything for herself. I am really looking forward to that. I ask her if she would go to back to school night in my place, telling people that she lost a ton of weight and had a face job, (To which they would say.............. "Man! I need the name of your doctor, because I have never seen anyone look that much younger after surgery!") but she didn't think we could pull it off. Now I am trying to decide if I just skip it, or go and have fun by asking my standard questions like, "Do you plan on grading and checking for poor grammer this year," so that I can hear one of my all time favorite cop-outs. "OH! I couldn't do that. It might hurt the child's self esteem if I criticize their work. We don't want to stiffle their creativity now do we?" No I guess not. It is much better to wait until they get to college thinking that they are good writers, only to have their first college professor rip their paper to shreads, and tell them they need to take a basic english course.

Man! I had no idea I had this much agression inside of me this morning. I guess better to take it out on the blog than kick the dog right? I am thinking of getting one of those little ticker things that I see on other people's blogs and count down the days until graduation. Do you think it will help?