From: brunner@telebit.com (Eric Brunner)
Subject: Re: Year-round schooling
Organization: Telebit Corporation; Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 20:56:42 GMT

In article <1992Oct2.140856.2895@news.columbia.edu> pjl2@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Paul J Landsberg) writes:
>Amy Moseley Rupp writes:
>>What I'd like to know is:

[daycare for children in YRS, omitted]

[the equivalent question for teachers, omitted]

>Huh?  I've never thought that female teachers time their pregnancies 
>with summer vacations.

Wouldn't a little smilie look good here Paul? The question raised has to
do with the opportunities teachers have to spend significant continuous
blocks of time with their own children, or to arrainge child care where
they are unable to remain unpaid. 

>Actually this goes to point made by someone about how they lived
>in the tail of the gaussian, four years of divorce court battles,
>a long and arduous settlement, etc.  What we are talking about is
>the public education system.  Can anyone honestly want to impede
>ideas, projects or whatnot simply because people out past 2sigma
>won't be fully accomodated?  IMO, make changes to the system that
>will benefit the greatest number of people and THEN, and only then,
>work out the knotty details of unusual situations.

Hi Paul, as the 2sigma poster, using private schooling, you may
not have much interest in our observations. To recap, we were faced
with the likelyhood of going public, and if we'd done so, we'd have
had to avoid YRS as it would have had serious complications on the
custody pattern. This got me at least thinking about non-same-district
seperated families, vacation and 2nd family patterns and bonding
opportunities, and child-care in the out-of-sequence NCP's home and
so forth as "hidden costs". Whether actual joint-custody and non-same-
district residences are prevelent or not I can't claim, use your own
judgement, milage may vary. I know that recent published survay work
on award patterns suggest that this is not a 2sigma issue, but the
YRS districting issue was not included in the recent Stanford multi-
year tracking study, so it is only a suggestion that a significant
number of seperated parents do not reside in the same school districts,
and use public schools.

I don't mind your putting our needs last, greatest good for the greatest
number and all that, since we have the economic ability to avoid public
policy which dosen't meet our needs, however, there is a possibly non-
empty set of persons similarly situated without the same economic agility,
and the mechanism proposed to obtain the desired end isn't exactly the
most compelling one to have come down the pike.

Two years ago at a conference of family and juvenile court judges, one
of the speakers went on at length on how custody striff _could_ be to
a degree reduced if the public policy view of the role of schools (both
publich and private) was expanded to include being a vehicle for joint
custody -- in brief, that "visitation" was a built in, like parent-teacher
conferences and recess, following on the fairly sucessful pattern now
followed w.r.t. wages, support-orders, and garnishment.

Divorce isn't a 2sigma issue, and getting little Jonny to read isn't the
sole concern of institutional education. Whether one is pro- or con-YRS,
the cost issues of expanded staffing (paid and volunteer) for city Parks
and Rec, libraries and day care ought not be ignored when your district
is considering transitioning to YRS. At the very least, a cooperative
regional magnate school with bussing ought to be costed in for those
children who cannot participate in YRS, whether due to residence patterns,
or non-solvable vacation-period family activities (like returning to the
region where one or both parents originate from), as well as parental
professional development. So to should be the self-selection YRS may
require school staffers, for reasons of their own, described in several
earlier posts (not all mine :-)).
-- 
Eric Brunner Tule Network Services
uucp: uunet!practic!brunner
trying to understand multiprocessing is like having bees live inside your head.

Newsgroups: sci.edu,misc.education,misc.kids