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parents:why_do_i_have_to_pay_for_this

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Why Do I have to Pay for an All Access Subscription?

In most cases the simple answer is: you do not have to.

For some of you, you may have to accept the hard truth.

Benefits

The principal benefits of an All Access subscription are:

  • The ability to remotely make changes to end of day plans for a student
  • Send a prompt message to the student that will appear during dismissal
  • Get real time notifications during dismissal of the process
  • Receive information alert messages from the school that may necessitate changes in dismissal plans

Offer to Sell vs. Compelled to Purchase

If you don't care about getting any of these benefits then you don't have to make a purchase.

When you go into a grocery store and the store has organic vegetables for sale for a higher price than for non-organic vegetables you don't question why the store is telling you to buy the higher priced organic vegetables. They are offering the option to buy them, not forcing you to buy them. For that matter, you may not even like vegetables so you don't want to buy any, but you don't ask the store to take out the produce section because you don't want to be inconvenienced by having to walk through it, you either bypass it or you pass through it quickly. It may inconvenience you but you don't expect the store to not serve other customers just because you don't want to buy produce.

Access Should Not Cost Anything

Really? Why not? You can get television signals for free over the air with an antenna but a lot of people still pay for cable or satellite TV. If you don't pay for television you don't expect that you will get to watch ESPN™ even though when you do pay for service you will still have to watch advertisements on many of the channels.

If you go to a movie theater and there are empty seats left over should the movie theater just let people walk in and sit in those seats? It won't cost the theater more money to run the projector if the seats are empty or full. It doesn't cost a stadium more money to let someone sit in empty seats at a ball game or a concert, either, but no one expects them to give those seats away at no charge.

Without All Access

Whether parents have an All Access subscription or not, each school manages to get students where they need to be at the end of the day. In many cases they do this only through a Herculean effort with frantic calls, intercom messages, slips of paper, and other means to accommodate the changing needs of the parents.

Even though this process doesn't have a specific, attributable cost like the purchase of an All Access subscription you can be well assured that there is a cost associated in the form of stress and fatigue on the part of every staff member attempting to do their best every day even while knowing that at least one person is still going to complain and in most cases no one will appreciate the effort.

Schools and school staff should be allowed to make instructional teaching their chief priority but the dictates of parents are often preventing that. As a society it seems that nearly everyone believes that they are entitled to extra consideration beyond having their children educated and are not willing to shoulder any of the burden.

The Hard Truth

You may be one of those parents that has unachievable expectations such that the effort of meeting your needs outweighs the level of effort that the staff are willing to undertake and may have deleterious effects on the operation of the school as a whole.

If you are a parent who

  • routinely requires changes to the end of day process for your child or children,
  • who constantly badgers staff regarding the location of the children during dismissal, or
  • regularly contacts the front office to request that staff communicate a message to your children

then do not be surprised when you are informed that in order to get satisfaction you must invest in the purchase of an All Access subscription.

Whether or not you elect to make the purchase still ultimately resides with you, but do not expect to be the person who gets let into the movie theater without buying a ticket.

parents/why_do_i_have_to_pay_for_this.1502911581.txt.gz · Last modified: 2024/03/05 12:58 (external edit)