Student aide = unpaid labor
My daughter Abby runs errands, charts school bus arrivals and cleans graffiti off lockers at her middle school in Boca Raton.
She is a "Student Aide," a middle school elective that I allowed because the rest of her schedule is extremely challenging. But as she tells me what she does each day, I am starting to see this elective as a way for the school system to get free labor, which they used to pay adult aides to do.
She is assigned to one of the assistant principals, who is in charge of discipline and bus problems, among other things. Among her tasks is filling in bus arrival times each morning so the AP can see which buses are consistently late.
She runs around the school a lot to find kids the AP needs to talk to, usually about a fight on the bus or on campus. She also listens to the attendance hot-line and writes down who will be absent that day and what their excuse was.
She likes this elective and will get a grade in it. She is definitely learning about the inner workings of her school. But she also is doing work formerly done by grown-ups whom we no longer have the tax money to pay.
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