Wednesday, August 8, 2012

4ft is a BOY!

Has been since he was born -- I swear. He looks like a boy, sounds like a boy, and hurts me constantly with his boy-like behavior.

Let me share my pain.

4ft's school district has it's enrollment paperwork online. Which is cool in one way that it's mostly filled out and you just have to update a few things like address, medical stuff, and who is allowed to take your kid from school if you can't for the year then you hit submit and you're all done. No paper, no tiny print and little boxes, no having to try and find a pen because your kids always snag them and then they're gone FOREVER. It has ONE GLARING problem in the fact that the pre-filled information can NOT be changed when some joker in district inputs the child's sex WRONG you can't click the box and change the F to M.

This happened last year. I called the district -- they said it had to be done at the school. I called the school they "fixed" it. I get the enrollment link to re-enroll 4ft in school and sure enough it's labeled my BOY a girl... AGAIN. I called the school and she told me she could change it in the school records (which said girl) but not the district. I mentioned that district said it had to be fixed at school level and I'd had this problem last year as well and the school had "fixed" it then. She explained that they use two different programs and the district is the "parent" program so even though they change it in the school's program the "parent" program comes along and corrects it. So district has to fix it on their end too.

So, then I called up district. They again told me that it had to be done at the school. So, I calmly told them what the school had told me. So it didn't matter how many times the school fixed it, after school starts, the parent program "fixes" all the data so it matches on the school's program which makes my handsome little BOY into a girl. Now this isn't a huge deal unless they give him something that says girl but when he hits middle school and high school if he gets enrolled in girls' PE I'm going to be bent sideways (even if 4ft wasn't -- naked girls! Score!). She chuckled. Apparently I'm funny. So she said, let's see what we can do and after a half an hour on the phone she finally found the magic box that said edit and changed the F to an M.

This took a couple days of leaving messages and going back in forth between the school and the district. All for one shmucky little box. Naturally 4ft was over my shoulder when I was filling out the enrollment form and asked me what the F meant. So he was pretty bitter they were calling him a girl. I also made sure to mention that 4ft was understandably upset (it matters when you're 7 1/2) with the typo. I was understanding last year. I get data entry typos happen, although with something as important as this you'd make sure you had it right, but when it was supposedly "fixed" and then to have to do the whole dance again -- I was a little bitter.

*crossing fingers* Here's hoping that I don't have to go through this again next summer.

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