Sep 1, 2011

Local School's "No Parents Allowed" Policy, Just Isn't Working

A recent Channel 4 report, states that parents at a valley elementary school (Hudson Elementary School in Brownsville) have been having to wait hours to be able to pick up their kids at from school due to a new policy that bans all parents from being able go inside the school.

Apparently the way it works is, any parent that wants to pick up their kid from school is given a number, when they go pick up their kid after school they give the number to a security guard. The guard goes, and gets the kid with the matching number, and brings him to the parent... one at a time.

This was all, I'm sure, someone's bright idea to prevent kids from being taken by strangers. It would seem like a great strategy except for the fact that the report also pointed out how, one of the main reasons for all the delays is that, on several occasions, the security guards bring out the wrong kid to the wrong parents.

This doesn't seem to be working. I'm also not sure if banning parents from campus is a great strategy either, I understand the need for safety, but the schools aren't prisons. There's plenty of reasons why a parent-visit to the campus might eventually be necessary.
I give credit to the schools for caring enough to want to protect kids, but this system obviously isn't going to work. It definitely falls under one of those ideas that looks good on paper, but just not very practical in the real world.



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