Saturday, February 10, 2007

Bug Hill Update

Valentine's day is next week. I'm not sure what V-Day is like in a large high school, but here it is something else. All the girls will get at least one flower arrangement (parents will buy for their girls so they aren't left out) and many will get multiples.

So, the school and the flower shops are working together to get their protocol in place. This involves very careful planning to organize times for delivery. They've tried it all - flower shops requiring orders at least 24 hours in advance for delivery, restricting deliveries to certain times, etc. Nothing ever works. Girls will drag flowers, balloons and candy from class to class. Some classes will be so full of flowers and balloons, the kids won't be able to see the teacher.

I don't have girls and thank goodness. I wouldn't want my girl to be left out, so I'd be one of those parents sending flowers. And those are so expensive. Some of the families have lobbied to stop all deliveries to the school and insist that they be done to homes after school. The flower shops point out (I'm sure truthfully) that this would severely impact their business.

In a small community you're constantly trying to balance everything. We can see that deliveries impact learning for that day. It impacts the pocketbooks of the parents and teens. But stopping it would mean that our flower shops would probably be forced to go out of business. It truly is their largest business day. Even bigger than prom. So we have to decide if we want to lose businesses in our community (which has shrunk way too much over the past few years) or decide that one day of reduced instruction in school just isn't that big of a deal.

Clearly, so far we've decided that it's just one day.

Now I just have to decide what Mr. Gaia is getting.

1 comment:

Tanya Brown said...

Bleh. Yeah, I remember that kind of thing, except that at our school it was sending flowers for cheerleader/baton twirler tryouts. Now that I look back on it, it was an immense disruption to class. Those poor teachers!

Good luck finding a present for Mr. Gaia! I struggle with this issue every darned Valentine's day and still haven't found a good approach.