Carpool Craziness

My children go to a public school. However, it is a special public school where parents had to submit their child's name to a lottery prior to kindergarten to gain entry. Hence, almost none of the children live in the school neighborhood. So far, we love the school and find that both girls are receiving a great education and many additional extracurricular activities they might not have found at our neighborhood school.


One of the huge drawbacks to our school, are the parking and drop off/pick up situations. Typical to most local elementary schools, the parking lot barely provides spots for the teachers and staff. Since almost every child has to be transported via vehicle to the school every morning, drop off is a zoo. The school tries to minimize the whole operation, but somehow every morning I have to practice anger management to survive the whole process and make it in to work on time.


Today, my coping method of choice will be to bitch copiously. Frankly, I am tired of being the rational parent who follows the rules when I just feel like screaming. Remember, my oldest is in 3rd grade, so this is year 4 of the daily debacle. I can not comprehend why parents can not follow the simple drop off procedure. They actually have three separate drop-off zones. Drive into the drop off area and pull as far forward as possible, shove your kid out of the car, and move on once safe and the car in front of you leaves, right?


Alas, the idiots at my school can't seem to do any of this. We have the parents who just pull in, park their car, and exit the vehicle to actually walk their kid to class, leaving their huge SUV sitting in the middle of the too small drop off zone. (…and I do not care if you have a child too young to walk alone to their class. If this is you, go park your darn car on the street like you are supposed to and then walk your child to class!) We have the parents who pull in, but still exit their car and help children out of vehicle or take things from the trunk, or stand and have long conversations with their children in the drop off zone. My favorite today was the dad who actually dropped off his two children in a timely fashion and actually stayed in his vehicle, only to then slowly inch by inch follow his kids as they slowly walked toward the school entrance, while the rest of us were unable to drop off our children because we were stuck behind him as he slooowly moved. I know I sound like a cranky bitch but I have years of anger here to let out.


I could go on and on complaining about the traffic jam of trying to exit the school with drop off zones full of idiot parents who can't follow rules on 3 sides of the campus, the parents who illegally double park or create parking spaces to suit their needs, or the parents making illegal turns and maneuvers to secure what is best for their family everyone else be damned.


Actually, I do spend way too much time contemplating why this happens every morning over and over again. Do you think these parents really don't understand the rules? I don't think so myself. Do you think they feel that the needs of others are less important than their own? Now, this I am more inclined to believe. Is this yet another situation where people think they are raising kids with good self esteem, but actually are just teaching their kids that the rights of one outweigh the rights of others? I suspect there might be some other explanations. Do you have one?