What Happened to School Parties?

My 2nd grader came home with a list of kids in her class and a note that read “we’ll pass out Valentine cards on the 10th, if you want your child to participate.  Please bring in a shoe box or bag to place their cards.  No party.”

I don’t have to ask, because I’ve already asked in years prior – there is no party because there is no room in the schedule for a party due to constant state testing, and the endless test prep work that goes along with it.

Kids today really have it much rougher in school than I ever did.  I can remember coming home in the 2nd grade and sitting outside coloring, swinging, and watching nature for hours in the warmer months.  My daughter?  Oh, since Kindergarten she’s had to come home and do what amounts to several hours of homework most nights.  It’s actually gotten to the point where she will “forget” to pick up homework worksheets just so that she can have a break.  While some parents would call my daughter a lazy student for doing that, I can sympathize that, after seven hours at school, kids need a break!

All in K-12, I can count on one hand how many times I had legitimate homework that I couldn’t finish in ten minutes or less.  Today, my 5th grader gets a daily workload comparable to my college experience.  Every week there is a state test for him, and that requires hours upon hours of studying.  He’s required to read a novel a week and take a test on it.  He’s told to come home and do research projects and write papers.  He has to create an invention, write about it, find similar products, and fully design the thing.  And all of these tasks stack on top of one another to where he’s eating as slowly as possible when he comes home, because he knows the rest of the night he’ll be trapped in school work.

And because of this school environment and it’s constant demands, these young children rarely have any down time to reset their brains and just be kids.  That’s why I see it as a huge concern that schools won’t take the time to allow Christmas, Valentine, Easter, or other parties once kids hit 1st grade.  We aren’t even Christian in my household, but I’d still prefer my daughter get to have a Christmas party where she can relax, smile, and have fun in class at some point!

My 5th grader doesn’t even know half the names of his classmates because there is no time to actually interact and meet with these other kids.  Even their one recess a day is thirty minutes that is combined with lunch – and waiting in line for lunch, which, sometimes, it takes twenty minutes to get your food alone.  Then, if it’s too cold to go out, the gym is closed so they have to sit at the lunch tables or go back to their classrooms and quietly work.  Plus, even though the school morning officially starts at 8am and no one is tardy before 8:01, the kids must be present at 7:45 to do “morning work,” which is required, but ungraded, busy work that the teachers flip out about if they miss.

It gets to the point where you might as well forget about extracurricular activities that your children might actually enjoy, because the mantra is “school comes first,” and there is never a break in that work load.  Well, I am breaking out of that mindset, and if the 30th book report of the year doesn’t get done, too bad so sad.  I bought into that garbage that education is everything, graduated college with a 3.8 GPA, and am still looking for a job that offers a livable wage.  LIFE is what’s important, and not missing life because your face is crammed in a book takes priority with me these days.

Why are we torturing these kids now?  It’s clearly not making them smarter or making test scores any better.  The top school systems in the world let children play and think and create for themselves.  Even the Japanese, who are known for rigid and difficult schooling, don’t start standardized testing until middle school.  And Texas has seen a huge academic improvement from letting kids have an extra thirty minutes of recess a day – so WHY do we keep following the same failing trends?  Overworking kids and making every minute of their school year miserable is NOT going to get results.  We’ve proven that a thousand districts over!  So I say back off with the books and stop telling six-year-olds that they’re too old for holiday parties!

Student Loan Repayment – Mission Impossible

I’m a little more than frustrated today.  I’ve been trying to get my hard working husband set up to request the federal student loans Income Based Repayment plan.  He has a four year degree, and despite the student loan office at Ohio State swearing that would earn him $50k a year, he makes about $12 a hour in the ONLY full time job offer he’s had since being honorably discharged with the military.  This will be our second year that both of us are applying to defer our combined $70k+ in debt (roughly $30k a year income for a family of four), and it’s getting ugly.

In 2012, my husband’s student loans were sold off to Sallie Mae.  You may think, “well, it’s supposed to be a government affiliated, so that is the same as the Department of Education owning your loan.”  That’s not quite true on several levels, especially if you need assistance.

First, Sallie Mae will appear to have tons and tons of repayment options available.  It’s true, they do exist, but finding them can be a particularly challenging task.  Somehow, I stumbled upon the Income Based Repayment (IBR) form and got it ready, had my husband sign off on it, and mailed it away along with our 2012 tax return copy.  Simple right?  WRONG!

Magically, the IBR application never reached their office, despite being mailed a little over sixty days before repayment was set to beging.  I don’t know how many letters they get in a month, but you would think that sixty days would be enough to get to my husband’s deferment application.  Who knows, perhaps the papers will resurface in the future, but it seems like offering an option to mail the application is a trap.  If they say they didn’t get your application in time, you are paying money you may very well not have until they get the matter straightened out.  Sure, it will probably go to an IBR plan eventually, but you are screwed until that time comes in, even when you did everything right on your end.

If you think I’m being paranoid, try applying for any kind of government assistance (which I have in past years).  Daycare assistance, food stamps, medical coverage – many applications will suspiciously get bounced around and disappear no matter how they were turned in, or how much need a person has.  I remember going back to school and asking for daycare help, based on income I was supposed to pay $1 a month with assistance, but what happened to my applications?  No one knows, but I was stuck spending $250 A WEEK until that was straightened out, and if I had not had signed/dated receipts for our two dozen application turn ins, and a furious husband willing to fight for the assistance, that would have NEVER been refunded.  I would have dropped out of school from a lack of money to pay for daycare.  Every time they lost my application, they had the potential to save their department $1,000 a month in child care costs.  In short, you as an individual are not as important as the budget, and that is especially true in populated areas that are short on funds.

Back to Sallie Mae.  My second issue is that their website is confusing and unstable.  When I tried to log in and redownload the IBR form, it was nowhere to be found!  I looked everywhere, even went into the online forms section, and there was no IBR form.  I filled out the “See if You Qualify” preliminary form, and all I got were “error” messages and glitches that sent me to the loan homepage.  I even Googled “Sallie Mae IBR Form” and NOTHING could directly link me to get this document again now that the loans were due!  Notice that the section to submit payment never acts up like this.

Worried, I checked my Downloads folder on my computer, and luckily for us, the previous IBR form I had downloaded was still there.  So, I printed it, filled it out again, got my husband to sign it, and went to upload it online this time.  Simple right?  STILL WRONG!

Sallie Mae is a student loan company, and that’s pretty much all it has ever been.  So, dealing in forms and fees is all they do.  Now, I’ve learned that forms disappear and hide, both online and when physically printed and mailed in, but electronically submitted forms leave a trail that’s harder to lose.  However, despite being a big, money oriented company, Sallie Mae offers a confusing upload process.  You must log in, find the proper section to upload into (I suspect many forms get “rejected” for not going into the proper folder) and then find out that the document you are uploading, no matter how many pages are involved in the form, has to be UNDER 5 MB!

Why is the upload size so small?  Surely they can afford IT professionals and larger capacities to make this a non-issue.  I had to rescan and reformat the document three times to get even two pages to upload without rejection.  This, to me, is like Google blaming the users for click bombing (I’ll let those of you who are unfamiliar with this term look it up yourselves) when Google writes the codes and could easily disable people from multi-clicking advertisements.  If Sallie Mae makes it nearly impossible for you to upload or snail mail your applications for IBR, or other deferment plans, it is still your problem, your fault, and your responsibility.

I’m sorry, but once you teach the dealers to cheat in a casino to avoid losing money, you’ve ruined the system for everyone, and that is exactly what this is.  Sallie Mae is a company that sets out to make money, the fact that it is government sponsored does not change that fact.  If they were here to help students and truly keep them out of default, forms would be more readily available, uploads would have much larger limitations, and mailed forms would not vanish off the face of the earth.  Funny that I never had an application to apply for student loans or a payment go missing like that, don’t you think?

All companies making a profit WANT you to DEFAULT.  Why?  Because then the government pays your tab AND the bank still gets to come after you for the rest of your life to pay the loans.  The laws have made these loans nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, so the banks can come after you legally for the rest of your life, and inflate you interest rate to just about whatever they want in the process too.

Pretty sweet deal.  You get an education, find no decent paying jobs anywhere, and then have a swelling debt over your head for ages to come.  If that weren’t stressful enough, you have to worry about these petty games when you have no money to pay the loans back, even though these places are supposed to be there to “help” you.  This could only be worse if the loans were private instead of federal!  I am sorry to all of you poor souls with private loans – truly!