First Day of School Open Thread
Decatur Metro | August 2, 2010Decatur is one of the few metro school districts that sends kids back to school today; a week earlier than most surrounding districts.
In addition to the early start, this year’s calendar differs from previous years in that there are now full weeks off in September and February, as well as the week of Thanksgiving.
So here’s an open thread for all you parents who had to get back in the school routine again today, a week earlier than everyone else. Tell your “first day” stories, gripe about the heat, or lament about how old your kids are getting. Let ‘er rip.
Couldn’t have had a more positive experience at our fist day at Winnona Park Elementary.
How awesome is it that the principal’s name is Mr. Wiseman? Kind of like Luke Skywalker is the perfect name for a Jedi-in-training.
Glad to hear it Chad — we had an excellent experience at Oakhurst Elementary as well. Parents were invited to join their kids in the classrooms, which I really appreciated. Tons of parents everywhere, in fact, many gathered on the front lawn of the school afterwards for coffee/snacks. Helped make a new (and a little intimidating) experience much more relaxed.
Mr. Wiseman is the awesomest principal ever. He knows who I am and he knows that I think this!
Although I think Mr. Thomas at Renfroe is definitely going to rank a close second…we’ll see!
I think I said hello to almost a tenth of Decatur residents on the way into and out of Glenwood this morning. Positive energy everywhere, and what a wonderful group of teachers, parents and kids!
My biggest laugh came when running into a parent in the stairwell whose child insisted on walking into class on their own – they’re growing up folks! Enjoy every moment you can share with them.
Got each of my 3 kids off to their first day at a new school. As I was dropping off my K’gardner and rushing to see my 4th grader on the field at Glennwood, I realized with a start that I didn’t have a kindergarten tear…headed off to a very organized and enthusiastic Glennwood.
Last stop was at Renroe to fill out some paperwork. The once-drab hallways are now brightly lit and the building seems to run smoothly. Didn’t see my son..but that was probably a good thing! Enjoyed seeing principal Thomas scooting around the halls on a wheelie vehicle due to a torn hamstring.
Decatur CSD, you’re off to a great start!
CSD First Day Haiku:
Pandemonium
Excitement, emotion, fun
Then quiet halls, peace.
Both children are at the SAME school for the first time since Westchester closed. The early riser walked, the senior was mama limo-ed, but she did wake up in time. (We’ve got issues, don’t ask.) I’m thrilled, THRILLED that they’re back in school. Gonna be chocolate-chip cookies ready for them when they get home, and then we’ll go out to buy school supplies.
Wonderful 1st day of school!! The best was when my 1st grader cried dropping off his brother at College Heights for Pre-K. He was sad because he knew his brother was scared!!
I think everyone was okay. Drop-offs at Winnona Park and CHECLC, walkers to DHS and a bus rider to Renfroe. I had to do the paranoid-mom thing and call Renfroe to make sure my sixth grader made it; we had to leave the house before her bus got there so she was still at the bus stop when we left! (Thank you Ms. Reuter, for letting me know she was accounted for at Renfroe this morning!)
For all my griping, I do love CSD and my kids REALLY love their schools.
We’ll see how the bus transfer goes for my Pre-Ker this afternoon!
Yes, you can LOVE CSD and your kids can REALLY love their schools, principals, and teachers, and yet you can still have legitimate questions and concerns about individual CSD decisions! Not an oxymoron. This is how it SHOULD be in a system charter.
Thank you people for your expressions of your experiences and feelings this morning as our schools begin another year. My son is a DHS sophomore now, but this helped me re-experience his earlier years at Clairmont, Glenwood and Renfroe.
I agree with all the positive comments about City of Decatur Schools – all the schools are awesome and we should be proud of them!
However….
First day of school on August 2nd with a week long break barely a month later?!?!? Crazy… I can’t believe the CSD administration has succeeded in ramming this schedule down our throats. The results of the parental feedback on this topic (solicited over the past 2-3 years) were never made public, to my knowledge, and I have rarely met a parent who thinks the changes are a good idea. I really wish the whole process had been more transparent.
We need candid comments from members of the Calendar Committee here but not sure any of them who read this blog will feel comfortable posting.
Karass… i could tell you, but then I’d have to shoot you.
What the calendar committee does is top secret and all happens in an underground bunker in the dark of a full moon night. And we all strip naked … talk about calendar configurations.. then we come back up to the surface, romp through the woods and howl at the moon. It’s pretty creepy.
The underground bunker.. is, of course, located under the field at Westchester. If you go by at 3 A.M. some nights, you will see our cars parked on the field.
Ooooo. Right in the flood plain! Cool! This is what I call true transparency!
Thank you calendar committe member for summarizing the process so well – it was great fun!
In 2009, the calendar committe was presented with a summary of the Calendar Survey for 2009 – 2010. Out of 465 respondents, 55.48 % were identified themselves as a parent/guardian of a CSD student. 238 out of the 465 (or 51.18%) preferred Calendard B (this year’s calendard – shorter summer with longer breaks during the year).
to Karass – my candid response/post is my disappointment in the total number and number of CSD parent surevy repondents. In the future, more survey particapation is a must in order to make our (CSD Parents) voices heard.
Can you break those responses by parents vs. teachers? I was not on this intrepid committee (see description above) but when I saw the data it looked like the teachers were overwhelmingly for this year’s calendar and the parents were overwhelmingly for the usual calendar. i also heard that a selling point of the original proposal was that these unique week breaks could be used for enrichment but I believe I’ve heard that now the budget can’t cover that. I know the committee requested that the calendar be evaluated at the end of the first year to see whether it achieved the stated benefits.
Like most of the posters here, we’ll take advantage of the week for a cheaper and less crowded vacation. But I know many families, especially single parents, have indicated that they find this calendar very hard. Unfortunately, sometimes the folks who have the hardest time are also the folks who are so overworked, stressed domestically, and out of the communications loop that they don’t speak up for themselves.
Oh, and I agree that it’s a disappointment that more parents didn’t respond to the survey. I feel the same way about low voter turnouts. Maybe posters on DM should only be permitted to post on political topics if they can demonstrate that they have used official opportunities to register their views, e.g. through CSD surveys, the polls, public comment at City Commission or School Board meetings, etc. Enforcement would be difficult.
I’m totally against the new calendar for many reasons I’ve stated here before. I started to list them but then exhausted myself. I just wanted to chime in that there are plenty of parents out there who do not support the new calendar. And DID fill out the survey.
Actually, about 2/3 of parents were against the new calendar. About 2/3 of staff were for the new calendar. Overall, as said above, about 51% came out in favor.
It was pretty pathetic that only about 250 parents responded.
It’s not pathetic if that’s the number of people who feel strongly either way. Who’s to say the vast majority of parents weren’t content to go with the flow, knowing that every calendar scenario carries with it some pluses and some minuses, some winners and some losers.
If there is no way to heed everyone’s individual circumstances equally, answering the survey only serves to maximize the chance that things will go your way rather than someone else’s. Maybe Decatur just doesn’t have that many people concerned with getting their own way every time… choosing their battles, so to speak.
If that’s the case, I wouldn’t find it pathetic at all. I’d find it refreshing.
It took about 15 seconds to answer the survey. Staff members and parents put hours into designing it to make sure it was fair. We wanted to know where folks stand. If it didn’t matter, you could have taken a few seconds to tell us that.
Apathy is the reason we have some really crazy fools in office.
I have no problem with the calendar. I just would have liked to see folks get more involved overall with their school system. More active involvement and less Monday morning quarterbacking would go a long way.
I filled it out! I promise! I’m so used to being on the losing side of votes in this state that I get a perverse pleasure in voting anyway!
Okay, you wanted to know where folks stand, but to what end? Even if every single parent had filled out the survey, there would still be some who ended up not getting what they wanted. How would that prevent Monday quarterbacking?
The calendar is the calendar and no conceivable alternative can please everyone. Accepting that doesn’t mean that parents don’t care or aren’t involved.
I believe in parental participation and have had the honor of meeting a lot of committed people during my time in the system. Maybe part of the problem is the suggestion that devoting 15 seconds of ones time to fill out a survey constitutes active involvement. If the many troopers I’ve seen tirelessly volunteering at CSD are any indication, that’s a bit insulting.
The reason for getting a high rate of participation in a CSD survey is so that one knows whether the responses can be considered representative. In this case, if there had been a high rate of participation and two-thirds of parents opposed the proposed calendar, then the school system would have known that solid concern existed and it better have some darn good justification for instituting the calendar anyway (e.g. that the teachers felt the opposite, or budget, or chance for enrichment–which btw got canned with the budget, etc.). Since the participation was low, one can argue that a response bias exists–those opposed were more likely to respond–and the survey may not represent the true proportion of parents opposed. On the other hand, the small group of respondents MAY have been representative of parents in general, one just doesn’t know.
The survey I’d like to see is of the 11-18 year olds in RMS and DHS after the September break week. CSD assures us that there will be child care options for the younger children, e.g. at Decatur Rec, First Baptist, the DBA Community Center, so hopefully those kids are all with parents or in a safe, positive setting, maybe even with some enrichment depending on the setting. But 11-18 year olds have less options and even many of the preteens resist going to group care settings. So what do they actually do during that week? We know from this blog that many will go on great family trips. What will the rest do? Some working parents do not have employers who are understanding about taking off a week in September the way they would be if it were over the winter holidays. Will kids sit at home and watch TV? Hang out….and if so where? And doing what? I’m genuinely curious, not advocating for anything, a nanny state or nanny school system, not saying that parents aren’t responsible for their own childrens’ care. I’d like to know this for the traditional breaks as well and then compare what families and kids do to the new breaks. This would be one measure of the impact. Hopefully, the more standard measure of impact are already planned for the end of this school -year–survey of parent satisfaction with the calendar, teacher satisfaction survey, etc. The calendar committee definitely recommended a follow-up evaluation.
To Karass: the high school students and many of the middle school students will be at band, football, volleyball, cross country, and softball practices that week in September, because there will still be a football game, volleyball matches, softball games, and other athletic events that week. Other schools do not recognize that as a vacation week and still need to schedule these events with Decatur to get all their games/matches in before the playoff schedules begin. There will be no vacations for families whose children are involved in extra curricular activities like these, and that is a good number of them, certainly in the high school.
The first calendar survey conducted for this school year supported the traditional calendar, and that calendar was announced. Sometime later they came back with a second survey for the same year. How does that affect an analysis of the participation rate?
OK, I have a problem with the calendar now. I just realized the sports/band/cheerleading issue.
I think the issue here is that the school system really must improve their communication with parents. They try to let us know, but way too much of it is written in a language only some attorney or bureaucrat whose language cannot be understood my parents not trained in the code of the priesthood.
Great first day for us at WPES.
We love the new calendar. A break in mid-Sept gives us a chance to go on vacation during less busy times, and both kids and teachers get a nice breather during the semester. A great decision, in my opinion.
Another vote FOR the new calendar. We’re already making plans for the September and February breaks – love the opportunity to travel while most other schools are in session. Even liked the shorter summer. Activities for middle schoolers (too old for camps, too young to volunteer, years from driving themselves anywhere) can be hard to find.
Good start today at Renfroe!
2 Kids at Clairemont and we also like the new Calendar and are excited for another great year!
KMD, obviously we haven’t met because I do think this schedule is a good idea! My high schooler was so burned out last year come February that I truly began to worry about her. She’s always loved school, but last year was very academically challenging for her. She soldiered on, but I think she could have benefited from more breaks throughout the year.
Today, she went off to school happy to see her friends and get back into the routine again, but also making plans for the week off in September.
I also love the new calendar. The break actually is after six weeks of school. And the rest of year is structured to have a break at six week intervals (except that Thanksgiving splits the 12 weeks between Sep break and Christmas break 9/3 – i guess that can’t be helped) i know that it still feels like summer but it is hot and horrible outside right now – an air conditionned building is no hardship. In September is should be a much nicer time to be outside. In K my son was beat by Christmas break. I know the buses aren’t air
conditioned and when my child was in kindergarten it was a worry he initially. He is
very temp sensitive in general but has never
complained about the bus, hot or cold.
Today was a great drop off at WP. Lots of positive energy. Miss Whitley will be missed. I was a little sad because although my eldest child is only starting 2nd grade this will almost certainly be our last year at WP. Next year we will surely be at Glenwood. I am happy about the reconfig and the structure of the school system at CSD. I really like narrower ages gaps in each school even if it means that my two kids will only be in the same school for 2 years during their whole education.
School’s back in!
Love it!
Please watch for bikes and pedestrians and watch your speed on neighborhood streets as you go to/from school and work.
Thanks.
Can you imagine what it would be like to have 3,000 adults show up for their fist day of work in one day? Bravo CSD and kids!
On the deepest note of irony…
I asked my 4 kids at the dinner table to tell me one thing they love about their new teacher/class/schedule. My third grader’s response was…
drum roll…
“I LOVE that my class is in a trailer!”
LOL.
Considering your quote in the AJC this week, that response is absolutely priceless.
That’s totally hilarious!
No one tell the kids the grown ups don’t like the trailers. As long as it is fun for them and they think they are special, that’s what counts. I have to confess, I always wanted to be in a trailer as a kid. It seemed glamorous and exciting.
My kids have been hoping for one ever since they appeared on the CSD scene a few years ago. The thrill seems to be having your own special self-contained space outside of the main building. For those whose kids have been in trailers, does the novelty wear off?
I love walking out of Glenwood after dropping off my daughter and running into Naaman and a few other knuckleheads. And hey, there’s some coffee! Good times….good times.
And then…–you had to go to work! HA!
OMG!!! Now that’s a committee I need to get be on!
First day was great. Dropped 6th grader at bus stop, watched him from a discreet distance as he got on the bus. (Note: there was no wave good bye or acknowledgement from him as he departed). Confirmation that I have reached the “uncool” stage of parenthood! Checked on younger child at CL and met with parents to have coffee and chicken biscuits in the Library. Nice start to the day – thanks again to teachers, principals, and CSD staff. And then… I also had to go to work. And work late.
I hate to be negative, but sometimes it almost feels like this school system is purposely trying to drive people off. Maybe they are trying to get enrollment numbers down. Just sayin’.
I wish they systematically collected data on folks who leave the school system for reasons other than moving. Sort of an exit interview or survey process. Similarly, they could collect data on families who have been going to private school or homeschooling and then come to CSD later as new or returning students. I think it would be fascinating and perhaps dispel all sorts of myths out there.