Free Willy

The summer of 2014 is dying an early death. Although I get very little writing done when my kids are home, I morn its passing. Summer is for regeneration. It's for restarting the engines and making a fresh start.

I feel our school district has robbed my children of precious moments. We no longer have enough time to go on a family trip because the schools want to show our kids more R-rated movies and other trash. Do I sound angry? I am. It would be different if the school had an outstanding program to offer. But they don't. In fact my son has moved to another school in search of a better program. I hope his search will be rewarded with more than an extra hour of driving every day for his mother.

Summer is for working hard at your first life guard gig or mowing lawns or growing things. It's for reading piles and piles of library books. It's for wandering down a mist-shrouded beach to watch the dolphin pod as it works its way up the coast. It's for lying back in the tall grass and watching clouds sail across the sky. It's for that moment when you reach the peak and you can finally shrug out of your pack and gaze into the wind and out across the ranks of tree-clad mountains. It's for smelling the grass as you raise your bat in your first ballgame.

I'm not one of these moms who doesn't care about my children's future. But I have seen up close what this district has to offer. And it doesn't cut it. I feel as if our children are being wrenched from us to be loaded into stock trucks instead of being taught vital information they'll need in colleges and universities. They won't be good for anything but flipping burgers when they get out of todays schools. They certainly won't be fit to solve their own problems or use their imaginations in useful ways.

Give our children back their summer. And stop trying to shove them into holding bins to be babysat instead of teaching them.