Reply to MCPS Code Green Thursday On-Time Opening. Also open for activities Wednesday.

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Reply to "MCPS Code Green Thursday On-Time Opening. Also open for activities Wednesday."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The problem with this decision is that in the future people may wonder if they will reverse course again. I have never seen them change a delay to an open on time until today. Will they in the future change an already announced closure to a delay or open on time?[/quote]

This is my biggest worry. Whether the decision was right or wrong, at least we could rely on it. Things might get upgraded (delay to closure) but never downgraded. If suddenly we have to plan for additional contingencies and them changing their minds after they've already made an announcement, that way lies chaos.

I am trying to be patient with this new superintendent and give him the benefit of the doubt. There are things he has done that I have liked. But this was an "underprepared small district superintendent" move. Once they made the decision, they needed to stick to it. MCPS is not Stafford County. Daily operations are like parallel parking the Titanic. There were a lot of cascading effects of this reversal that are really problematic. As one example, swaths of interpreters for IEP meetings got canceled because supervisors rightly relied on these decisions never being reversed once they're made and there's a fee for cancellations within 24 hours.  Now they can't be re-engaged on such short notice so the time is wasted and the meeting has to be rebooked anyway, for example. Cutesy messages about "confusion" and "joy" show an ignorance of the domino effect this caused and were tone deaf.[/quote]

What you described doesn't seem to be a problem. If they were going to cancel due to a closure, cancelling due to losing the interpreter isn't any *worse.*

The parents already had to take off work during that time.  If the meeting could go forward, great. If not, then again it's no worse than cancelling due to weather.[/quote]

Maybe in purely mathematical terms, it's not worse. But canceling due to weather vs. canceling due to disorganization feels worse and is demoralizing for people who, on an ordinary day, would be mortified to mess up a parent's schedule because of an interpreter issue and still feel responsible. And it's worse for the superintendent because he now has staff who will be spending 2 hours at work thinking about how they could be meeting with Mateo's mom and Alvaro's dad right now except for the superintendent's unprecedented logistical dumpster fire that caused these knock-on effects like a bull in a china shop that they're now stuck cleaning up. Whatever. It's fine.[/quote]

Calling the delay messes up the parents' schedules, not calling off the delay. Calling off a delay only makes things better for most, and no worse for everyone else.[/quote]

You're right. I just feel frustrated because there was zero acknowledgement of all the scrambling everybody did, parents and teachers alike, to make childcare plans, reschedule appointments, re-work the IEP calendar, fix the interpreters, try to reschedule field trips, explain to baffled parents new to special ed that the morning PEP class was canceled and now it's not, etc. This whole sequence of events has caused people to waste so much time yesterday and today rearranging things and then trying to un-rearrange them, or sitting there in frustration realizing they can't get the trip or the meeting back or whatever. And then we get this flip message about moments of joy. Nobody's feeling joyful about cleaning this up. Just an unnecessary dumpster fire all the way around. Staff and parents are owed an apology acknowledging what this caused.[/quote]

Exactly.
-parent[/quote]

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