I am absolutely fed up, and I know I am far from the only parent asking this question.

Can someone please explain why the boys’ yeshivos in Lakewood have already been underway for TWO WEEKS, the boys’ yeshivos in New York have been open for A WEEK, and yet not a single girls school has opened?

Who exactly is calling the shots here? And more importantly, does anybody making these calendars give even a moment’s thought to the parents?

There are thousands of families where both parents work because they have no choice. We are working to pay our mortgages, grocery bills, camp bills and enormous tuition bills — many of us making it through each month by the skin of our teeth.

And then, for reasons nobody seems capable of explaining, our daughters are sitting home for weeks after camp ends.

Who is supposed to watch them?

Parents who have jobs are somehow expected to tell their employers that they need to take off for a week or two because the schools decided that September apparently begins at a different time for girls than it does for boys.

It is absolute insanity.

And please, spare me the explanation that the teachers need a vacation after working all summer.

You know who else needs a vacation?

The parents.

I didn’t get one.

My wife didn’t get one.

Most working parents I know didn’t get one.

We worked all summer. We paid for camp all summer. Camp ended nearly three weeks ago for my daughter, and we’ve been scrambling ever since.

Now, finally, the schools are beginning to open. But first we get the almost comical “orientation” — a tiny fraction of a school day — before actual school finally begins on Thursday.

Orientation? After nearly three weeks at home?

How about opening the doors and having school?

I would genuinely like someone from the leadership of our girls schools to explain the logic. Why can the boys start Elul on time while the girls remain home? Why is it simply accepted that working mothers and fathers will somehow figure it out? Why isn’t the burden being placed on families even part of the conversation?

And let’s discuss tuition.

Parents are expected to pay every dollar of tuition, on time, regardless of how difficult their financial circumstances may be. Schools understandably tell us that teachers must be paid, buildings must be maintained and budgets must be met.

Fine.

But shouldn’t parents be entitled to expect school in return?

If the school year is going to be shortened by leaving our children home for weeks while parents are forced to miss work, hire babysitters or cobble together childcare arrangements, perhaps parents should begin asking whether the tuition bill should be shortened as well.

Maybe parents need to band together and say enough.

Maybe instead of automatically paying the full year’s tuition, parents should calculate what these weeks without school cost their families and deduct it.

That might finally get somebody’s attention.

This isn’t about attacking teachers, who work extraordinarily hard and deserve our appreciation. It is about a system and a calendar that appear completely disconnected from the realities facing the families paying for that system.

We deserve an explanation.

Who took achrayus for this schedule? Who decided this makes sense? And who is going to take responsibility for changing it?

Because expecting thousands of parents to simply absorb weeks without school year after year is not normal.

And parents need to stop pretending that it is.

A Frustrated Working Parent – NY/NJ

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