At the school by me every day is a line that stretches for blocks of parents picking up their kids at 3pm. All of these cars and human time was previously handled by a school bus and one driver.
A few decades ago (before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the WWW), I attended a fairly large public elementary school, and it seemed that most of us just walked (or rode bikes) to/from school.
Sure, a few kids got rides on most or all days, and many rode a bus (sometimes a school bus, or sometimes a church or YMCA bus that ferried kids off to supervised after-school activities). We might get a ride to school if we were running late in the morning, or get picked up if we had an appointment after school, or if the weather was awful. (And I made sure to have a good look for my grandpa's car every afternoon: Every now and then he'd show up seemingly at random, and we'd go get ice cream.)
But at 3:00PM, what broadly happened was that we filtered out onto the quiet sidestreets that bordered the school and [eventually] made our ways home.
The daily line of cars was short enough that it didn't take any particular special consideration to manage: Folks just parked on streets that weren't used for lining up school buses and it all seemed to work fine.
It worked fine. It seems a bit chaotic in retrospect, but it really was just fine. Nobody got kidnapped or murdered. If we were late getting home it was because we were just out fucking off somewhere being kids.
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Nowadays, I do some work sometimes at much smaller public elementary schools that requires me to take a break when the hallways are flooded with kids, and that gives me opportunities to passively observe what goes on.
Every afternoon, rain or shine, a huge organized line of cars appears, on dedicated pavement that did not exist decades ago, and organized individual dismissal of kids into their requisite cars begins. It looks like madness to me. Some cars even show up an hour and a half or more before dismissal, and the drivers seem to remain in the car the entire time -- just waiting.
So what changed?
To posit a theory: In this particular school system, reorganization didn't help at all. Schools were consolidated, and on average they shrunk (the big school I went to still stands, but it is empty). Due to what I can only presume is complete mismanagement, this lead to a lot of kids needing to go a school that was very far away and required riding the bus instead of just walking home.
But also: Parents of school-aged kids these days largely grew up with the Internet, and that made the world seem like a scarier place than it actually is.
People are paranoid for a variety of reasons about their kids.
Also, culturally, parents don’t let kids walk home. When I was a kid in NYC only the kids bussed in from the hood had busses, the rest of us from the local neighborhood walked. State aid only reimburses for trips beyond a certain radius.
I think the reporting of bad things has gotten intense through social media and parents don’t know or realize that we are living in the safest era ever.
1980s East Germany, many homes did not have a phone. My parents could have gotten one, their job was important enough, but they did not want to be disturbed at home so they never asked for the great privilege of having a home phone.
Once when I was 10, 11 years old, I needed to call home from school.
I had never used a payphone. I had perhaps rarely used our rotary home phone to dial out.
Of course it was after school hours, and a stressful personal crisis already, and no adult was hovering nearby to explain anything.
I figured out how to put in the coins and enter the number on TouchTone, (just like I'd seen on TV) but I didn't know what a dial tone or ring tone sounded like, nor a busy signal, and the line was in use at home, so indeed it was a busy signal that I patiently listened to for several minutes. I believed it was ringing and nobody was picking up.
By the time I was 21 and working at my first job, I was promoted and given a cubicle with a phone on the desk. I was quite anxious that it would ring and I wouldn't know what to do with the call. I was working for an Internet provider!
It can be challenging to make your way to the school’s office once the facility has been taken over by an armed gunman, which is a great reason for kids to have comms at all times, if not one that commonly arises.
Is it just paired with his phone that he has access to on the weekends?
Asking because I've thought about this before (younger kids) but I don't think the AW operates standalone and I didn't want to pair it with my phone.