Other than lawsuits, losing track of a child is every school districtโs worst nightmare. We havenโt lost anyone yet, but an EdTech company has painted a compelling picture of this as a possible future problem that can be pre-solved with EdTech. Therefore, weโre pleased to introduce some cutting-edge yet profoundly user-unfriendly technology.
Youโve already been given an app for reluctantly volunteering to run the book fair, an app for viewing your kidโs hastily prepared report cards, and an app for lodging complaints about our apps. Effective immediately, weโll also be tracking your childโs whereabouts on three additional apps.
First, if your child is going to be absent, log into your PITA, which does not stand for โPain in the Assโ but for โParents Informing Technology of Absences.โ If you forget your login, call our wonderful school secretary, Marjorie. No, you canโt just call the office to tell Marjorie your kid is sick; youโll need to call the office to retrieve your PITA login information, then log in to PITA to tell PITA your kid is sick.
Second, if your kid needs to leave school early for a doctorโs appointment or orthodontic torture session, log into your Dismal. (Dismal is an abbreviation of โDismissal.โ) You will also inform us of your childโs early dismissal when you arrive at the school to pick them up, at which point Marjorie will confirm that the dismissal has been logged in Dismal. If you forgot to log the dismissal in Dismal, everything will be the same, except that Marjorie will log it for you. Unless she forgets.
Third, if your child will be staying after school for an activity, log it in your Ass (โAfter-School Stuffโ). Of course, you already completed the permission form in Piss (a shortening of โPermissionโ) and paid the activity fee in the other Piss app (โPaying Incessant Sumsโโand yes, we know from the app complaint app that youโre confused by the two separate Piss apps). So when you go to log the activity in your Ass, we already know which activities your child is doing. You know, your child knows, the principal knows, the school secretary knows. Still, we need you to log in and tell a piece of Ass software what we all already know.
Since many after-school activities recur daily or weekly, we initially worried that parents would resent the repetitive task of re-inserting everything into their Ass every week, but the Ass app company assured us that once they get used to it, people love putting things in their Ass.
Yes, itโs true that one warm and competent woman used to do the work of all these apps with nothing more than a pen and a little notebook. But donโt worry, Marjorie is still our school secretary. Plus, more great news: We hired a few new part-time assistant secretaries to help Marjorie manage all the apps.
Is this time-effective? Of course not. Weโre dispersing the labor previously done by one person across five paid employees and hundreds of parents and guardians. But is it cost-effective? Also, no, weโll be paying for the apps, the part-timers, and Marjorie, who used to perform many interesting and varied tasks but now mostly just clicks things in apps, and she is no longer warm and feels incompetent.
So, will these PITA, Dismal, and Ass apps prevent your child from going missing? Absolutely they will, as long as all parents and guardians in the entire district, along with Marjorie, and Gill and Jen and Martin and Amy (the new admins), use all three apps consistently and no parent ever forgets to log their childโs whereabouts and the apps themselves donโt ever glitch or scramble information or lose service and no child ever does anything unpredictable.
And if, somehow, one of those ironclad links in the chain breaks and a child goes missing, donโt worry, the outcome will be the same as ever: We will find them in the bathroom texting on their phones. But this way, if we are ever sued, we can now mount the flawless defense โBut we have all these apps!โ
Or to explain it more succinctly: If a new technology exists, how could we not implement the most cumbersome version of it?
