It’s hard to find any silver linings in the ongoing pandemic but one thing to be thankful for is that even though the Delta variant is much more dangerous to children they still seem to be less affected than other segments of society. Not everybody agrees with this but for the most part they are also more protected. At a time when it seems like most people either are unaware, unconcerned or just too tired of it all to care that things are as bad as they have been since the beginning the places that our kids are spending most of their outside of the home time in are still requiring masks and quarantines after suspected exposures. Our softball game this past weekend was cancelled because of COVID protocols and there are quite a few students who have been forced to stay home for several days in an effort to try and keep everyone safe.
I also understand that not everyone has access to a home computer that their kids can use to keep up with their assignments. We were able to set up a nice little work area in the living room and even though my daughter really liked the Chromebook that was supplied to all the students to facilitate distance learning she really mainly used it for You Tube drawing tutorials after she was done with the day’s schooling. She would have really liked to have been able to keep it.
We didn’t obviously, and one of her own is on the short list for a potential Christmas present. We returned it at the end of the year and it should be a relatively easy transition for any child that has to stay home for a few days to be able to use the one that they were issued this year to be able to keep up with their classmates.
It should be but it isn’t. More than a month into the new school year the plan to redistribute these devices hasn’t been able to be implemented because from what I’ve been told half of them were never returned.
Half of them. Not just a bunch need to be replaced because they were damaged and a few others got lost or maybe accidently moved away with their borrowers. Apparently that many people in town just decided that until somebody called them out on it and made them return this expensive piece of technology they just weren’t going to. I’m still working on trying to get an answer to why they weren’t better accounted for and why they aren’t being called out on it but I’m also having a really hard time getting over the fact that there are that many parents that just thought this was OK.
I’m told that another factor is that we can’t staff an IT department, that like most other positions in the school system we aren’t financially competitive with the surrounding towns. A recent e-mail suggests that the students should be receiving them soon but that’s little help to all the kids that have already had their new school year disrupted.
Regardless of when they get them or if the number I heard was exaggerated the idea that enough parents simply let their kids keep these devices or kept them for themselves for it to be a problem is infuriating.
Is it entitlement, selfishness, something else that I don’t understand? What kind of example to their kids is this? I’m pretty positive that none of my daughter’s friends still have theirs but how would I explain that to my kid? Would the other parents even have the decency to be embarrassed if I called them out on it?
This isn’t a new problem for me. I find it harder and harder to understand how other people think, to understand their motives and justifications for their actions. If that makes me sound arrogant and judgmental I can assure you that it’s not the first time those accusations have been thrown my way and won’t be the last.
My job here is to try and raise a decent human being and the biggest part of that job is by setting as good an example as I can as to what that entails. I’m not always going to succeed but returning an expensive device that we had only borrowed from the school or not seems like a pretty easy decision to make.
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Previously Published on Thirsty Daddy and is republished on Medium.
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