For almost as long as Jeffery has been going to school, we have taken advantage of the ESY (extended school year). We do this to try to make sure that he doesn’t fall back on progress he has made throughout the standard school session. It is agreed upon and specifically discussed every year in the same way his IEP is. After over 12 years of school you might think this is something we would have down to a science. In this case it’s a science only if the the scientist is “Dr. Bunsen Honeydew” and his assistant “Beaker.”
For starters, we were told before the end of the school year, that Jeffery would be going to JR Tucker, one of the local high schools that participate during the summer with a special needs program. This was the mindset we were in. The fact that we received emails that clearly mentioned that he would instead be going to Douglas Freeman were somehow not processed in our supposedly intellectual brains. We just heard that drum beat mantra of JR Tucker in our head… JR Tucker … JR Tucker… goes together like jam and and “Smuckers.” (Sing it to the tune of “Love and Marriage” from “Married with Children”…to get the full effect. Focus Man…focus!
So his first day of summer school comes and of course, the transportation department has not yet told us when Jeffery would be picked up or the schedule he will follow. Because of this, we decided to take him to school that first day. We drove to JR Tucker with all the confidence of parents who knew what THEY were doing. We took him to the office and they blinked and looked at us as if we were trying to sell them encyclopedias. Nevertheless, they called a teacher over and she lead us to the special needs rooms and she started asking around if any of them had Jeffery on their roster. While some of them recognized Jeffery from previous years, none of them had him on their lists. It was then, ONLY then that we decided to re-examine our latest emails in regards to the ESY. Man…who misspelled JR Tucker so badly that it reads Douglas Freeman? We were at the wrong school. Fortunately, they are not too far away from each other so we loaded up the truck and drove to Douglas Free…Freeman that is. Another school…summer school. (Imagine banjo music). “Bad Dobby! Bad Dobby!! FOCUS!!
We once again took Jeffery to the office and fortunately, they actually were expecting him. A little sooner than when WE got there, but at least he was at the right place…sort of. Once we dropped him off and found out when we needed to pick him up, we researched what went on here. What we found out was that indeed, Jeffery was SUPPOSED to go to JR Tucker but they accidentally put him at Freeman. Since he was already in their system we decided to leave him there. This was also because their campus was more the enclosed school building as opposed to the more open campus of JR Tucker. With Jeffery’s perchance to wander, especially in a new place, we liked the more secure closed building. Now that this was settled, all we needed to iron out transportation.
Once we called transportation, we found out that they were operating under the same thought we were. They had been informed that Jeffery was going to Tucker and they had come by to pick him up previously. Might have been nice had someone told US. (By the way, I looked…this was a not a message we missed…now THAT’s a first). Apparently transportation and us were the only ones told he would be going to Tucker…someone forgot to tell Tucker. 🤔 They told us it would take until the end of the week to get this straightened out. That meant Mom’s red bus was still on the job. So, the end of the week came and went and we were still not any closer to getting transportation nailed down. Eventually they called and said that they would be here around 6:30am to pick up Jeffery arriving close to the 7:30 start time .and they would be bringing him back between 2:30 – 3:00 pm from a 1:30 dismissal. That was a lot of time on a bus. After discussing it and consulting the “magic 8 ball” who told us “It was decidedly so”…whatever THAT means, we decided that Mom would continue to take him to school and he would ride the bus home.
Well we got that settled…or so we thought. We have only had one other problem. You might as well use that magic 8 ball again to guess when his bus will arrive. It has varied from 1:55 pm to 3:00 pm. Maybe it depends on if the buses flux capacitor is operating at maximum efficiency? You would think we could get this narrowed down some. Perhaps some more experiments are needed…perhaps at “Muppet Labs, where the future is being made, today!”