The Best of School District Bureaucracy: No Summer Break For You!

Posted by Alex in Baby & Kids, Politics on June 17, 2009 at 4:16 am

Summer is nearly here and school’s out! Except for hundreds of poor students in Chino, California, who got an unwelcome surprise news that they have to sit for 34 more days of school because of a clerical error. If they didn’t, the school district would lose millions in funding.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the mindboggling bureaucracy and arcane rules that is the school system:

"We made an error on the minimum days of about five minutes," said Dickson Principal Sue Pederson. "Realistically, that’s our accounting mistake as adults. We’re unfortunately making the children pay for it by making them give up their summer."

Students at each school exceeded the state’s requirement of at least 54,000 minutes of annual classroom time, but the problem arose in the district’s minimum days. Schools typically have one shortened day per week, allowing teachers to use the remaining time for planning and parent conferences. Under state law, these days must be at least 180 minutes, and the daily average classroom time over 10 consecutive days must be 240 minutes.

An internal audit in early May discovered that 34 minimum days had been 175 minutes at Dickson and 170 at Rolling Ridge, said district spokeswoman Julie Gobin. That adds up to a shortage of 170 and 340 minutes, respectively, which could be made up in one or two school days. But under state law, these too-short days do not count at all, meaning that all 34 must be made up to avoid a state penalty of more than $7 million.

Seema Mehta of the Los Angeles Times has the report: Link

(Photo: Christine Cotter / LA Times)

 
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Australian Government Ruled that Identical Twins Aren't Related

Posted by Alex in Crime & Law on January 26, 2009 at 11:51 am

This is the sort of thing that only government bureaucracy can come up with: Australian immigration authorities have decided that Rosabelle Glasby couldn’t bring her identical twin sister into the country because … they’re not related!

Adopted by different families shortly after their birth in Malaysia, Mrs Glasby and Dorothy Loader were separated for almost 50 years before finally meeting last September.

But now Mrs Glasby, from Margaret River, is facing an uphill battle to be permanently reunited with her twin, who lives in Malaysia. In a letter to Mrs Glasby last month, DIAC state director Paul Farrell explained that despite the circumstances, the present laws meant Ms Loader would not be eligible for family migration.

"Under Migration Law where the legal relationship between a child and his/her birth parents has been severed by adoption, the legal relationship between the child and his/her birth siblings is also severed,” he said.

"It therefore does not appear that your twin sister would be eligible for a permanent visa under the Family Stream of the Migration Program.”

Mrs Glasby said she was heartbroken that her long-lost twin did not qualify as family. "We’re identical twin sisters _ we’re the same egg,” she said. “Just because we got adopted into different families they say they don’t consider us related. It’s hard to get anyone more related to me.”

Link – via Arbroath

 
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