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Am I Wrong?

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Clarissa

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My friends, I want to access your collective store of cultural competence as Americans. As you know, my daughter goes to a private school. This means we pay for her schooling. Today I received the following email from the school. I perceive it as outrageous and insulting, but I’m open to accepting that I’m wrong if people tell me that this is culturally appropriate. Here is the relevant portion of the email:

For the ’26-’27 school year we are requiring 10 hours of volunteering/service hours for each family.
a) Engage with staff, administration and PTL to learn about potential volunteering/service opportunities.
b) Hours will be entered and tracked in FACTS
c) Outstanding hours remaining at year end are subject to a fee of $25 per hour.
d) Log into FACTS, go to ‘Family Home’ and you’ll see in the middle ‘Service Hours’. Click ‘Add’ and you’ll be able to enter your hours. Be sure to mention what activity you served/volunteered for in the ‘Description’ section and who at [our school] can vouch for your service/volunteering in the verified by section. Then click Save.

Am I the asshole for thinking this is nuts and probably illegal?

Also, is it okay for people to whom I pay money for a completely optional service to address me in this tone? All of this has deeply Soviet vibes to me.

12 responses to “Am I Wrong?”

  1. Avatar
    Anonymous

    It is ridiculous but this is normal for private schools. My son’s school does this too.

    Liked by 1 person

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    it’s completely standard for private schools to ask parents for some degree of participation. But you should have been made aware of this before paying for her schooling, not after.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I don’t mind asking, but that’s not what’s happening here. This is a requirement that entails offering proof and suffering a serious punishment. Plus, the message is delivered in an extremely rude and condescending way.

      What happened to “the customer is always right”?

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    I don’t know if this requirement is illegal, since it’s a private school that nobody is compelled to send their child to — but it’s definitely an added cost above whatever the parents’ current written contract with the school already charges.

    You might consider threatening to sue the school for attempting to breach that contract, and see how the school responds.

    Dreidel

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  4. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    The best private school in my hometown (I know parents who’ve sent their kids there) runs this way. It’s part of maintaining the quality of the school: a flake filter. I know, I know, it’s a service that you paid for. Forget that for a minute. Every school, public or private, quality of the school environment depends on the quality and level of commitment of the students’ parents. There are plenty of rich parents who view paying tuition (or frankly, property taxes) as, basically, offloading all the parenting onto paid servants. The more such parents you have at a private school, the more behavior problems you have to deal with, the more entitled whingeing you get from “I’m paying you, that means I own you” types.

    This is how even the ‘nice’ private schools in Peru worked, when I still knew people who worked in them. Sure, everyone was paying tuition. But that meant that if you gave that kid a bad grade for poor work, parents thought (rightly) that they had leverage over you: give my kid a good grade or else. Doesn’t matter if the kid learned anything. If they didn’t: you’re a bad teacher.

    My friends’ kids’ school requires 20 parent hours per year. That’s why it’s the best school: that 20 hours acts as a flake filter, skimming off a hefty portion of the worst parents.

    If you are happy with the school, put in the hours, even if it’s cleaning gum off the bottoms of the picnic tables or repainting parking posts. Yes, they could hire someone else to do it for cheap. But that wouldn’t serve the purpose.

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      -the only problem I see here is that they have a “pay to get out of service” option: there are definitely parents who will abuse that.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Not at this school. These are overwhelmingly modest families.

        My kid’s beat friend is one of 8 children in a family where both parents work. I think it’s ridiculous to force people who barely have time to breathe to do this. Some people have infants. What are they supposed to do?

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This ends up punishing people with jobs. Who can hang out at the school, doing this sort of thing during working hours? Taking time off work means that you lose money no matter what.

      I don’t ask much from the school. In reality, I ask for so little that it’s almost comical. I want to be left alone and not bothered. I don’t care about their “academic standards.” I don’t care that their teacher of Spanish speaks Spanish at the same level that I speak Japanese, which is not at all. I accept that I will have to re-teach everything that they are supposed to be teaching. It’s fine. I don’t complain. The only point of that school in my life is that I can be left to work in peace. Sadly, the school dramatically overestimates its importance, as schools tend to do.

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  5. bluebird of bitterness Avatar
    bluebird of bitterness

    The Christian school my eldest daughter went to required parents to put in a certain number of unpaid hours (I say “unpaid” rather than “volunteer” because a thing can’t be both required and voluntary). We knew about it before we signed her up and we didn’t mind; it was how they kept tuition affordable even for parents with low incomes. But if I’d enrolled her in the school and then been told I had to put in X number of unpaid hours, then yes, I’d be ticked off.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This was sprung on us two days before the start of the school year. Nobody mentioned it before. It’s a new thing. Maybe they announced it at the Back to School event last week but it was parents only, so many people couldn’t go.

      I’ve gladly done several school events. But they completely killed my eagerness to do anything with this snotty announcement.

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  6. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Many schools do this but make it clear at registration that it is expected, they don’t spring it on families after the fact. That would piss me off.
    Some schools expect you to fundraise a particular amount of money to defray costs.

    I think it’s gross to allow families to pay their way out of it.

    re people working, they probably have opportunities like “help out at a weekend event” for people who work. Two weekend events would achieve the 10 hours.
    – Amanda

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      But what do you do with the children on weekends? They are not in school, meaning that parents are with them. I’m either at work or with my child. There’s no other state in which I exist. 😆😆

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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