Fed Up Fridays! Why Is School Pick-Up Such a Hassle?

As much as I enjoy the work I do when my kids are at school, I love seeing their happy faces at the end of the school day. It’s just a shame that I have to catch my first glimpse of them from the misery of the carpool pickup line.

The staff does their best to move the whole menagerie along, but it’s an exercise in extreme patience any way you look at it. At my kids’ school, there’s a one-way collection zone. It’s simple in theory: You enter at one end, wait for your charges, exit at the other end and then go on your merry way. If you’re smart or don’t have a job or a billion other obligations filling up your copious free time, you race to get there early, sliding smugly into first position. (First position isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, trust me; from this vantage you get a close-up of the bullhorn-wielding carpool cop who is doing her damndest to manage the whole mess when she’s not eyeballing you suspiciously for just sitting there, when it’s clearly not your fault the art teacher never lets your second grader out on time, is it?) But since there’s only one first place, chances are you are more like twenty or thirty cars into it. Which means you must wait until twenty or thirty other minivan pilots collect every single one of their passengers, a task that shouldn’t take an eternity but most days it does.

Despite the clearly posted signs to enter only at the designated end, every day a handful of clever chauffeurs careens in through the exit lane and tries to edge into the line. (Um, no.) And blatantly ignoring the carpool cop’s chorus of remain in your cars, dozens of others use pick-up as their personal social hour, recklessly abandoning their running vehicles to saunter down the line to chat with their buddies. They usually leave their driver’s door wide open when they do this, the universal signal for Be back in a jiffy, promise! Only they never are, and laying on your horn, I’ve found, is not the best way to get invited to Popular Mom’s annual post-auction party. So more days than not I sit and I idle and I listen to a chorus of I’m starving and when can I have a playdate with Avery and why are we just sitting here and how come you forgot to put money in my lunch account again and I try to will my head not to explode.  

Unfortunately this otherwise lovely school has about six parking spaces (and the whole ‘hood is a no-parking zone, conveniently, during school drop-off and pick-up hours) and no bus, so unless you can walk to school, it’s the ghastly pick-line for you.

My advice: Go zen. And bring lots of snacks.

Is your school pick up routine testing your patience?