Too Much Technology: Me Vs My Daughter’s School

Yesterday at 7:24am I got the following notification in my email:

Dear Kellie,
Student {daughter’s name) exited bus KCE_xxx on March 8, 2016 7:36 AM.

I was puzzled for about a minute, then I remembered that sometime last term we had been told that the school was implementing a system that would notify us when our children used school transport. I frankly did not think much of it.

I can see why the school and some parents felt this is a good idea. We are in the hyperconnected era, and it doesn’t hurt to know if your child got to school alright in the morning, and home alright at the end of the day.

I however do not like this system. It is not working for me, for two reasons:

What is wrong with that notification? The email time stamp read 7:24am, but it is to notify me that my daughter got to school at 7:36am. I am sure there’s a perfectly reasonable techie explanation for this, but my noticing this gave me serious doubts as to whether the system is as precise as it claims to be. But this is not the main reason why I do not want this system.

The real reason is that I am not at all a helicopter parent, and at the same time I panic easily. In many ways, I am the traditional parent. I do not have CCTV to monitor my nanny (when I start feeling like I need to, it’s time to replace the nanny), I have never felt the urge to buy a GPS device to track my child or any of the other tracking stuff modern parents are buying these days. I trust that when my nanny hands my daughter over to the school staff in the morning, she will reach school safely; that’s some of what I pay the school to do. If something happens in the 3km between home and school, someone in school will find out within reasonable time, and they will call me. I trust that they have systems in place should there be a crisis. The same applies to the trip home. If at 1pm she isn’t home, the nanny will call me, I will call the school and we will resolve it. Unless my daughter is sick, or I’m working late, I do not call home during the day. I instead focus on my work when at work, and on her when at home. This traditional method works just fine for me and I feel the school is transferring some of its responsibility to me.

This new method is fodder for my panic. What happens the day the notification doesn’t come in because the system isn’t working, the care giver forgot to have my daughter check in or for any other reason? I’ll go into a panic, and start calling the school to check if she is fine, something I have not done so far.

Finally, it makes me wonder. Is it a sign of weakness in the school’s crisis management process that they need this system? When the child is on the bus, he/she is the school’s responsibility, shouldn’t they be the only ones to worry about what could go wrong in the commute? I feel like they’re passing on some of the burden to me.

But then, may be some parents want to track their children, I do not.

Part 3 of our moving out of home series will be up next, in the mean time, read part 1 and part 2 here.