Bad Pick-up line

The elementary school my son attended has a system for pick-up and drop-off.
There are four sets of kids who attend the school:
Walkers - kids who walk to and from school (the smallest group)
Bus riders - kids who arrive and leave on big yellow school buses
Car riders - kids who are not bussed, whose parents pick them up and drive them home
Day Care - kids who are transported to and from school by a vehicle owned by the
.day-care they attend.

The school has organized pick-up with specific routes for all four types of entry and exit with the idea of kid safety in mind. The issues they wish to avoid are the danger of accidents (car and pedestrian), the danger of kids getting overlooked and left at school, and the danger of kids being kidnapped (there's been one non-custodial parent who tried to take his kid - the police had to be called,) and the possibility of a kidnapping scare when both parents show up for the same kid due to some mis-communication (which has all ready happened once but was quickly resolved on the grounds.) These aren't older kids; this is a k-4 school. The kids ages (in August, when school starts) range from four to ten.

The flow of traffic is organized to avoid the above-mentioned dangers and issues. The buses pick up on the opposite side of the school from the side where the parents pick up, and the day care kids get picked up several yards away from the car-riders. The walkers leave through a different door, and are led away from the school and accompanied a full mile by an adult crossing guard in a reflective vest.

Cars picking up kids come into the lot through one driveway, form a line, pick up at the door, and continue in the same direction, leaving through another drive at the other end.
At that end of the lot is a circular drive, like a cul-de-sac, except the end is open to the "road" that goes past that end of the school. That is where the day care drivers park. The cars go on the left side of the cul-de-sac to avoid risk to the day care kids.

It's all very well organized, and would work great, if it weren't for a fifth group; the Hoverparents.

There used to be a small number of kids whose parents would hover by the door until school let out, then grab their kids, and go. At the beginning of the year, this group comprised of less than five. This group should be very small. During my son's last few years there, one set of parents was justified in being there because their child had a serious, non-custodial parental kidnapping risk. The rest didn't really need to stand around the building, but some were waiting for kids who couldn't leave until everyone else did.

Parents of the kids in the safety patrol do not crowd into the line, because our kids can't leave until all of the other kids are picked up. Because of this, ours are the last kids to be picked up. We do still have to be there, throughout the process, because the time it takes varies by up to ten minutes, and the teachers do have lives outside of school, so it would be as rude for us to make them wait as it would for us to get into line knowing we're the last parents to pick up.

When my son was there, the Safety Patrol parents always parked our cars and waited until the line was gone. Some parents waited in still-running cars. Others waited where they felt they could better see their kids doing the safety patrol job. I liked to watch my son while chatting with whichever parent was there to pick up the child mentioned above. Unfortunately, halfway through Autumn, parents who did not have kids in safety patrol began joining the hoverparents, crowding onto the paved area around the school's main door. I became concerned that the group was getting too big for the teachers handling the end-of-day exit to monitor safely.


The hoverparents group continued to grow unnecessarily, including many parents who were there simply to beat the line. One day, there were enough parents there to pick up an entire classroom full of kids. There were some near-accidents in the lot that were so scary that onlookers gasped like an audience watching acrobats in a circus. It was just crazy. There is no sense in risking one's life, the lives of one's children, and the lives of others, in the pursuit of shaving a few minutes off of the time it takes to pick up a kid at school. Soon, my concerns were echoed by a few other parents and some of the teachers. Since I didn't actually need to stand by the door, I decided to set the example and switched to watching from my car.

When it boils down to it, none of us except for the kidnapping risk family actually had to be in that space waiting for our kids, and with the number increasing, a lot of confusion had been created. This presented a number of dangerous circumstances.

The most likely danger to lead to an actual disaster involved the flow of hoverparent car and foot traffic.
Car pick-up parents began lining up at the door a full fifteen minutes before the Kindergarten kids got out. The rest of the grades came out three minutes after that.
Hoverparents began arriving at about the same time as car parents, and the flow of that traffic continued throughout pick-up, with cars driving in and out of the lot, cars backing out of parking spaces, and pedestrians crossing traffic to get to their kids, and then to get their kids to their cars.

To get to the parking spaces in the school's narrow lot (just enough room for two "lanes" of traffic in between the sets of perpendicular parking spaces,) the hoverparents had to drive past the line of car pick-up parents, both in the lot, and on the street before.Then, some of them used the "left" lane to try to exit the lot through the "in" driveway, going against traffic like a salmon swimming upstream. More than once, this caused a traffic jam.

Parents were passing cars on the street, driving in the left lane for up to fifty yards to do so, then turning left into the school's lot. These parents jealously guarded their place in "line," turning left in front of oncoming traffic if they thought the driver coming toward them was trying to "cut." Several times I saw near accidents as people driving past the school were nearly hit by angry parents who assumed they were other parents trying to cut.
Once in the lot, hoverparents didn't bother to slow down much. They seemed to not understand that this was a pedestrian area... until they were the pedestrians.

Then, they would walk in front of moving vehicles without looking, and get angry when tires squealed and horns honked at them.


I normally arrived at about 2:00 to 2:05, before there was a long line in the street, and while crawling my van through the lot to find a space, I'd usually had another mom behind honking at my slowness. I rarely could get through that lot without someone driving halfway up my tailpipe. In the meantime, I had to watch for parents crossing in front of me without warning, some of whom assumed the horn they were hearing was mine. More than once I got the finger for no reason.

I also had parents nearly back into me because the don't look when they back out of parking spaces after grabbing their kids. When I had to go into the building for something during pick-up, I was nearly hit walking to the door from my car, as parents speed out of the line after picking up their kids, wanting to get on their way, not looking for pedestrians before they gunned it and went. In the meantime, parents in the line of picking-up cars didn't always recognize the danger of letting their kids get in on the unprotected driver's side of the car instead of the passenger side, where the sidewalk is. Every day I watched kids going out into that careless stream of hoverparent traffic to get into the back of cars.

The accident risk was huge! I don't know how we got through the year without someone getting hurt.

The second danger presented by the hoverparents was in the chaos they created. When it was just a small group by the door, the school staff could keep track of who was being picked up by whom, making sure that no kids were leaving with someone who shouldn't be taking them.

Once the group increased in size, it created exactly the kind of dangerous situation which made my buddy concerned about his daughter's safety in the first place. With too many people to keep track of walking up to the school's main exit, it would be way too easy for someone to grab a kid and run, especially if it was someone the kid knew and didn't understand he/she should fear, like a non-custodial parent or a "nice" neighbor. Also, someone parked in a close-to-the-door spot could grab a kid and run, and be out of that lot before anyone could stop them.

The third danger isn't one most people would think of. With an extra flow of pick-ups to monitor, there is the chance that a kid could be left out or forgotten. A child who does something out of the ordinary, such as returning to the classroom for a forgotten item, going inside to use the restroom, or visiting the office with a question, might be overlooked. Because the hoverparent pick-ups were ending up not accounted for, school staff might not realize that one kid is missing. Knowing who is picking up whom, and when each kid leaves, is vital to the staff when trying to monitor the safety of each child. A missed kid could be stuck there for hours... and an unnoticed missed kid might even try to walk home.

One day, staff members were trying to figure out what to do about the issue of the Hoverparents (no, they didn't call us that - that's my assessment of the behavior.)
Listening to the discussion, I could hear a serious amount of stress in their voices. Their biggest worry was that harm would come to one of their little charges. Their concerns are valid - I'd seen some really close calls in the accident department, and I didn't know all of the parents who I saw standing in front of the school every day. Some kids did not even get picked up by the same people every day.
Unfortunately, the teachers were quick to realize that they could not directly control whether or not people chose to hoverparent. They could give orders, but had no way to enforce them as long as the kids were all ready out of the building.
As the staff continued to brainstorm, and idea struck me, and I made a suggestion, which they really seemed to like:

Why not set up a sign-out for the car-riders whose parents do not get into the car line? The kids could be kept inside until an authorized person was there to take them. That way, school staff would know who is picking up each kid and what time they left. It would slow down the hoverparent pick-up process enough to discourage parents who are hovering just to get out faster, and protect kids in real at-risk situations from potential predators who should not be able to snatch them and run.

They could even direct the hoverparents to a separate area, such as the gym, to pick up their kids, thereby making it even more inconvenient and slow to be a hoverparent. It would mean a few days of getting out late, but after the point had been made, the number of hoverparents would probably shrink to one.

The idea was seriously considered, and the staff was interested in implementing it, but they were overridden by the administration.

Guess why!

The administration had been fielding complaints from the hoverparents that the line was slowing them down. Some of them had even complained to the school board.

That's right. The people who weren't doing it right were complaining that everyone else, by following the rules, was inconveniencing them, and they got their way.

Instead, the teachers at the school ended up having to become traffic cops, actually placing their own bodies in the parking lot's parent-created "passing lane" to keep the dangerous group of hoverparents, and a new group of line-jumpers, from endangering everyone with their inconsiderate choices. They dealt with the hoverparents by physically getting in the way of their cars and holding a set of them back for each wave of lined-up parents they allowed to leave. Only when the line was not movie as kids got into cars were hoverparents permitted to drive through the lot.

In the end, this method did work. By making hoverparenting inconvenient and slow, they slowly encouraged parents back into the line. By the end of the year, hoverparents were down to a handful, and the pick-up was down to a science. There had been several near-accidents in the process of making that happen, as parents tried to drive around the teachers directing traffic and nearly hit them, but no injuries occurred.

It's just sad that educators had to risk life and limb to teach adults how to wait in line for 5 minutes.