How All Phone Calls From School Should Start

The school nurse called today, and I was really grateful that she started with “your son is fine…” before getting into the part where he bumped his head on the monkey bars. Funny that it was those damned monkey bars because less than a week ago, I was talking to my mom about how paranoid they made me, despite the fact that I used to swing around on them like crazy. This phone call got me thinking about other phone calls from the school and how they really all need to change their lead-in. For example:

The Weather Closings and Delays Message

The weather delay or closing message actually goes something like this. The stuff in parenthesis are mine: “Good morning (insert your area) school district. This is (some guy who’s name you really don’t care about at 4 in the morning) with an important announcement. Due to the inclement weather that is affecting parts of our region, resulting in impassable roadways and knocking out power to many homes in our district , all of our schools in the (insert your area) district (in case you forgot which district you belong to) will be closed today. – Notice how it took an entire paragraph to get to the part about schools closing? Imagine this message spoken in the slowest manner possible. Now slow that down about ten more times. That’s what I hear at 4am when school is closed.

This is what I want to hear: “Turn off your alarm clock and go back to bed, school is closed today. Oh, by the way, this is some guy who’s name you could care less about calling from the school in which your child attends, blah blah blah, you’ve already hung up, haven’t you? – Seriously, I could care less about the who, why, and where. I just want to know the what and when. If the school calls at 4am, it’s either closed or operating on a delay. Tell me which and let me go back to sleep.

The “Your Child Was in the Principal’s Office” Message

Usually it goes like this: Good afternoon Mrs. (my last name), this is (the last person I want to hear from) from (my son’s school). I just had Jacob in the office because he (insert something really inane that you never would have gotten in trouble for when you were little, but given our state of over protectiveness and total paranoia, we now consider a capitol offense). Blah, blah, blah, blah, can’t have this blah blah blah other student involved blah blah blah your son is suspended from the bus for one day. – Note that the blah blah blah’s aren’t an indication that I don’t want to know what kind of trouble my precious bundle of joy has gotten into now, but because I’m so anxious about the punishment that I can’t focus on the rest of the conversation.

This is how it should go: “Hello parent of Jacob, you’ll need to drive you son to and from school tomorrow because he’s gotten himself thrown off the bus. This is why…”- At least then, I can focus on the actual issue rather than worrying that the last words out of his mouth will be “expelled.”

Sadly, those are the only reasons the school ever calls me. If they ever did call me for some sort of nice reason, I would like them to start with “he’s not injured and he hasn’t done anything wrong.” Is that really too much to ask?