How do your kids get to and from school?

I also heard of a school in Florida where dismissal works like this: The cars line up, single file, outside the school where there are NO children outside. As a car reaches the front of the line, a school aide reads the name on the dashboard plaque issued by the school and barks into her walkie talkie, “Jeremy’s mom is here!”  At which point someone inside the school shouts, “Jeremy! Your mom is here!” And Jeremy is ESCORTED OUT to the waiting car — like an unpopular dictator being hustled into his limo.  Jeremy’s mom careens off and the process begins again, with the next car and kid. Dismissal takes half an hour.

via freerangekids.wordpress.com

PLEASE tell me she’s kidding. PLEASE tell me this isn’t really happening.

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  • Lenore

    Please send me your stories of getting to and from school! And I actually read about that particular kind of dismissal, so unless they stopped doing it, it’s reality, baby! Ugh! — Lenore , founder of freerangekids.com , who really does need fodder for her column on how kids are getting to school these days

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=613651863 Catherine Keene

    At my son’s school, we do something similar, although it’s been tweaked to make the process flow better. At dismissal time, all students go to the gym and wait for their rides. Cars enter the property behind the school, where the gym is, and we hand off our name placard to a teacher/assistant. The placards then make it inside the gym where names are called out in the order the cards were received as parents arrived. A group of kids will head outside once they have a handful, each with their respective name cards. Children identify their own rides and a teacher (usually there are 5 or so stationed around the drop-off/pick-up circle) make sure the kids get to their cars safely. No children leave the gym until a parent/guardian is there on school property. For our school, they start dismissing at 2:45 – I try to get there at 3:00 after it’s cleared out some. They are usually most of the way done by then.

    Now the vast majority of the students at my son’s school are car riders. His school only offers shuttles to certain areas (we are a charter school – no public buses for us!). I don’t know a better way to handle dismissal without it being an even larger headache than it is now. I couldn’t imagine if all 200-something car riders were standing outside waiting for their rides to get there.

    We don’t live in an area where walking to school is an option. The school, while close to city limits, is actually in a pretty rural area, with several farms close by. The dismissal process is pretty similar to how we were dismissed when I started kindergarten back in 1983. Again, I lived in a rural area, and if I had taken the bus it would have taken me an hour and a half to get home instead of the 5 minutes it took when my stay-at-home-mother picked me up herself.