Birthday party vent! updated

[happygirl]

Only two kids showed up from her class, but it was still fun she had the time of her life, she got a lot of attention from the person in charge of the party she loved that.

For all of you that said I should get a copy of address/email there is no way I could get that, The teacher said it is a privacy issue, since my daughter rides the bus there is really no way for me to catch other parents

 

[dawson5]

Only two kids showed up from her class, but it was still fun she had the time of her life, she got a lot of attention from the person in charge of the party she loved that.

For all of you that said I should get a copy of address/email there is no way I could get that, The teacher said it is a privacy issue, since my daughter rides the bus there is really no way for me to catch other parents

Our schools do a directory. It's part of the forms that come home the first week of school. It is entirely voluntary, you choose the information that you want listed (parents names, sibling names & grades, address, phone and/or email). For the grade school, they have the class list, divided by teacher. All the information you could possibly want or need. This is paid for by the PTO, if you wish for extra books I think they charge $2. I know for the middle school, the allotment is something like $600 to get this done.

I don't know if your PTO would be involved in something like this. I can't imagine you will be the last parent with this problem. It is also nice to have when they forget homework.

Glad your child had a great party. Small groups are so much more fun and easier.

 

[mjkacmom]

Our schools do a directory. It's part of the forms that come home the first week of school. It is entirely voluntary, you choose the information that you want listed (parents names, sibling names & grades, address, phone and/or email). For the grade school, they have the class list, divided by teacher. All the information you could possibly want or need. This is paid for by the PTO, if you wish for extra books I think they charge $2. I know for the middle school, the allotment is something like $600.

I don't know if your PTO would be involved in something like this. I can't imagine you will be the last parent with this problem. It is also nice to have when they forget homework.

Glad your child had a great party. Small groups are so much more fun and easier.

When my oldest started elementary, they gave out class lists. They stopped when she was in the 3rd grade (citing privacy issues, although we did have to agree to be on the list on a form). A parent took it upon herself to create the directory (through the school, a form sent home via backpacks), and it's been a yearly success, with parents volunteering every year. I couldn't survive without my directory!

 

[happygirl]

When my oldest started elementary, they gave out class lists. They stopped when she was in the 3rd grade (citing privacy issues, although we did have to agree to be on the list on a form). A parent took it upon herself to create the directory (through the school, a form sent home via backpacks), and it's been a yearly success, with parents volunteering every year. I couldn't survive without my directory!

I wish they would do one here

 

[lecach]

I'd wait. I have found it better to hand them out no more than 2 weeks before the party, when the parents have a better idea if they are free. Otherwise, they get put aside, and forgotten. I'm pretty good about RSVPing, but I've done this a couple of times.

Well next week is Thanksgiving week and most will be out. And then the next Monday is RSVP day. So I have to give them out this week. If it werent for a holiday next week I would agree with you.

 

[EMom]

We more or less HAVE to send invitations home via the backpacks. The directories usually do not come out until November, and even then, less than half of DD's class was in it. (Her birthday is before the directories come out.) There is no address listed in the directory, just a phone number. You can't mail an invitation to a phone number. We live in a very mobile town, and families constantly move. Even if they were listed in the phone book....and a large percentage are not.....by the time you get the phone book, they have moved to a new house. Or they are too new to the area to even be in the phone book. Many don't have a land line at all anyway.

There is no class email list. There is no class roster. The privacy issue is bordering on paranoid. Last year, DD's teacher wouldn't even confirm how many girls were in the class, let alone if I had the names correct. So I rely on DD to get the names of every girl, she writes the names on the envelopes and in the backpacks they go.

DD's school has a policy of switching the kids around every year and making certain a child is placed with NO MORE THAN two children from the year before. In other words, when your kid walks into 2nd grade, at best, they will only know two kids from their first grade class. I hate the policy, but there it is. My feeling is that it hinders making long term friendships, but they seem to think it makes the kids flexible and able to adapt. I think it teaches them that you can't count on anyone to be there from one year to the next, so why get invested? But that is another thread.........

 

[beattyfamily]

We more or less HAVE to send invitations home via the backpacks. The directories usually do not come out until November, and even then, less than half of DD's class was in it. (Her birthday is before the directories come out.) There is no address listed in the directory, just a phone number. You can't mail an invitation to a phone number. We live in a very mobile town, and families constantly move. Even if they were listed in the phone book....and a large percentage are not.....by the time you get the phone book, they have moved to a new house. Or they are too new to the area to even be in the phone book. Many don't have a land line at all anyway.

There is no class email list. There is no class roster. The privacy issue is bordering on paranoid. Last year, DD's teacher wouldn't even confirm how many girls were in the class, let alone if I had the names correct. So I rely on DD to get the names of every girl, she writes the names on the envelopes and in the backpacks they go.

DD's school has a policy of switching the kids around every year and making certain a child is placed with NO MORE THAN two children from the year before. In other words, when your kid walks into 2nd grade, at best, they will only know two kids from their first grade class. I hate the policy, but there it is. My feeling is that it hinders making long term friendships, but they seem to think it makes the kids flexible and able to adapt. I think it teaches them that you can't count on anyone to be there from one year to the next, so why get invested? But that is another thread.........

I could have written this whole post. Our school is the same way!!!

Also the same with the directory. Comes out in November and my daughter's birthday is in October.

I had a really tough time this year figuring out people's addresses and her classmates names.

Also the same in how they switch kids every single year. So my daughter only knew two kids. She kind of recognized kids from other years but wasn't close to them due to the fact that the classes change every year! So has a tough enough time bonding with kids but the fact that they change every year makes it worse.

Luckily the mom who handles the directory lent me last year's copy and I happened to go into the school to copy down the teacher my daughter was assigned and it included her classmates but that was it. They wouldn't send home a copy.

 

[mjkacmom]

DD's school has a policy of switching the kids around every year and making certain a child is placed with NO MORE THAN two children from the year before. In other words, when your kid walks into 2nd grade, at best, they will only know two kids from their first grade class. I hate the policy, but there it is. My feeling is that it hinders making long term friendships, but they seem to think it makes the kids flexible and able to adapt. I think it teaches them that you can't count on anyone to be there from one year to the next, so why get invested? But that is another thread.........

I thought all schools did this? We only have 3 classes in each grade, no more than 20 kids in each one, and by 3rd/4th grade, everyone knows everyone. I remember being upset when ds11's kindy list was posted, and he knew no one, and his 6 or so friends were in another class together. But when he went to 1st, he knew so many, some old friends, some new friends.

 

[hrh_disney_queen]

never mind I didn't read the whole thead and my response has been taken..LOL.

 

[EMom]

I thought all schools did this? We only have 3 classes in each grade, no more than 20 kids in each one, and by 3rd/4th grade, everyone knows everyone. I remember being upset when ds11's kindy list was posted, and he knew no one, and his 6 or so friends were in another class together. But when he went to 1st, he knew so many, some old friends, some new friends.

DD's school is large and the grades have between 8 and 10 sections each. DD's grade is cruising at about 170 at present. That's a lot of kids to move around and when you consider that at least a third of them can be new any given year, you don't get a lot of familiar faces from grade to grade. She's gone to that school from 1st to 4th. In second grade, she got two BOYS from her first grade class, which did not thrill her. In third grade, one of those same boys moved with her to the 3rd grade class as well as a girl from her 2nd....and they got a girl they'd had in their 1st grade class. So she knew 3 kids. In 4th grade, she got two kids from her 1st grade class and that's it. Not a lot of continuity.

I hate the system. We were kept with the same group of kids (with a little movement here and there) from K-5. We knew those kids like the back of our hand and they became like siblings to us. We were seriously bonded. I have deep friendships with many of them decades later and if needed, could call on one of them for help even if I hadn't seen them in years. That's how close we were. My DD will never have that.

Once we got in 6th grade, we were ability grouped, so we split up and made new close friends but that just widened our circle. By then, we had a strong sense of comradery that I don't think DD and her classmates are managing to attain. They are getting the message that friendships are fleeting and attaching yourself to a friend is pointless, because there's precious little chance you'll ever be in a class with them again. Why bother? Many of the parents have noticed this. They are making MANY friends, but they are superficial friendships that tend to not last instead of deep and lasting friendships that endure. What they are gaining in adaptability, they are paying for in other ways.

 

[zalansky]

Reading these responses reinforces why I don't do kid birthday parties anymore. We did two in a row for our first child and went through a lot of the same situations many here have faced. Who needs the aggravation or spending that kind of money anyway? Now we let him pick a friend or two and take them to do something fun. Then we let him celebrate with his class at school with cupcakes or a cookie cake. That money is better spent on a weekend getaway!

 

[agnes!]

I think I understand what many here want for their children, the friendships that last from grade to grade...but the thought that occurs to me is what a new kid can feel like coming into these established groups, a new kid could think the circles of friends look an awfully lot like cliques. And I'm glad that so many had positive keeping-classes-together experiences in grade school, but that's not always the case. Sometimes too much familiarity can indeed breed...well, maybe not quite 'contempt' but perhaps rather a type of social-group where all the labels that got stuck on you in 1st or 2nd Grade are still stuck to you in 6th or 7th. Everyone knows everyone else's reputation, deserved or not, good or bad.

I'm going to veer wildly off-topic here, but this is my family's own experience. In our own local school system the gifted classes are kept together from grade school into middle school and the rest of the kids get mish-mashed into different classes that later become "houses" or "tracks" (or whatever they call it) every year starting in the 3rd Grade but continuing during the middle-school years. So the gifteds get to basically stick together from grade school throughout middle school, they get to form lasting bonds but the rest of the kids never know from year to year who is going to be in any of their classes. But once they get to high school, it's interesting...the groupings finally start to break down in 10th and 11th Grade, when practically anybody at the local high school can take that AP class if they want to, they can take Honors classes if their grades were good enough the year before, they can take some real electives in 10th Grade and suddenly it doesn't matter what they got on some one-day assessments in the 1st or 2nd Grade.

Told you it was off-topic.
agnes!