If you’re a parent of a child in the Sac City Unified School District you might have been recently working through the open enrollment program to enroll your child at one of the district’s fine schools outside your own home area. If that’s the case I hope you were able to get your timeline straight, because the District was not. From the Open Enrollment brochure (PDF):
Elementary, K-8 and middle schools will be notified of placement by the Open Enrollment staff during the week of April 18, 2008.
The same language is used in this letter from the Superintendent. We’ll leave aside for now the fact that nobody in their right mind says “the week of” and then gives Friday’s date. According to the OE office, the April 18 deadline for the letters was apparently the “original date” based on previous planning. That language was apparently overridden by this Open Enrollment update (PDF) and the timeframe was moved up by one week:
Open Enrollment Acceptance Letters for Elementary, K-8, and Middle School applications were mailed on April 1. Registration timeline for parents who received the Acceptance Letters is from April 2 to April 18.
In other words the old “letters mailed by” date is the new “deadline for registration” date. This would normally be classified as a Big Change. Not by the folks at SCUSD, who list both sets of dates on the District’s open enrollment page. Adding to the absurdity is that the “original” dates are listed in the letter from the Superintendent, which is at the top of that page, while the “updated” dates are listed below that.
So what? you’re saying. Well, the problem as I see it is that since SCUSD did absolutely nothing to broadcast this update, and in fact obscured the information on their frakked up website, parents who hadn’t received the letter by the 18th might not have worried, since a letter from the Superintendent implied that it might be coming the next day. In reality, they would have missed the deadline for registering at their child’s new school.
Coincidentally, we never received any information from SCUSD about our open enrollment application. When I called today I was told that we were wait-listed at one of the schools.
The Sac Rag 
Looks like the idea of putting 42% of the statewide school budget toward administration (rather than toward fixing schools, buying materials, or, heaven forbid, teaching the kids) is really paying off now!
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They should have just gone with that “School is For Nerds” campaign they were working on, it would have saved them lot of trouble.
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Gee, Turty, you sound like Old Ghost, pulling facts and figures out of thin air. Statewide, K-12 schools spend about 6 percent of their education budgets for administration. This is administration as in the superintendent, district office and site leadership. When higher figures are bandied about, they almost always throw in facility maintenance figures like electricity, custodial, groundskeeping, etc., which have to be paid regardless, and which really have nothing to do with administration.
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