The School Year Will Be Much Easier For Everyone As Soon As You Do These 17 Unnecessarily Complicated Things
Trust us — we’re school administrators.
From: admin@highschool.com
Date: fall 2024
Subject: Welcome to the new school year!
Dear parents, guardians, special friends, and those whom we’ve yet to remove from this list even though their kids graduated several years ago:
Welcome to the new school year! We realize we already said that in the Subject line, but we’re really excited about this school year. Click HERE to read more about how great it’s going to be.
Thank you for clicking there! You’ve been great so far, and we look forward to a FANTASTIC school year. To optimize your letter-reading experience, please proceed to the District’s main sub-main alternative binary webpage and input your username and password. (We would offer you another Click HERE option, but District policy allows only one hyperlink per message.)
What? You’re saying that it’s not working? OK, try the other one.
No, not the other main sub-main alternative binary webpage; the other username and password combination that you always use.
You know — it’s the one you created the last time this happened. When you mumbled all those bad words upon hearing that you needed to create a different username and password.
You got it? Wonderful! Just out of curiosity, was it the one you use for your subscription to the rescue-cat newsletter?
Never mind. Now we can get to work. To hear more about how great this school year is going to be, we just need you to download the new software that the District got a sweet deal on over the summer. We realize that we did the same thing last summer and that all 40,000 parents will need to set up new accounts on yet another website, but trust us: this new platform is AMAZING!
Do not read any further until you’ve downloaded the new software.
Have you done it? We’ll know if you’re lying. We’re schoolteachers. Or we used to be. Now we focus on making schools run so much better, as you can tell.
OK, we just got an alert that you downloaded the software. You definitely follow instructions better than your kids do.
Just kidding! That’s school-district humor. (Yes, there is such a thing as school-district humor.)
OK, so now you’ll need to download the app that goes with this new software. Even if you won’t be accessing it through your phone, we promised the manufacturer that we’d make you get the app. That was part of our sweet deal.
Once you have the app, you’ll need to create a new email address. Not an old one that you don’t use anymore — or some burner account that you use on dating sites or to get discounts while shopping online. It needs to be a brand new one. Our computers are very sensitive, and they can tell if you’ve ever existed under a certain address anywhere in the universe.
Why must you create a new email address? Because the migration from our old system to the new system had some bumps, and our IT department says the best solution is for everyone to become a new person.
So, set up that new email address (no Hotmail accounts, please), plug it into the app, and then come up with a password that uses the first letter of every other word in a poem by Dylan Thomas.
Then download the software’s companion conversion app that will allow your old address, the one associated with our prior platform, to be connected to your new address. After that, authorize your student to approve your request for an Observer Account as soon as the pairing code linking the two is cleared by the district’s IT department. (This shouldn’t take more than two or maybe five weeks.)
Trust us, this new platform will make things so much easier.
As soon as you have your new, new address that is nothing like your old, old address, go into your browser, empty the cache, delete the cookies, turn the device off and on three times, and then say a prayer.
Once you’re back online, simply log in to the District’s website, go to Settings and then Sub-Settings, change everything from On to Off, log out, log back in — this time under your old, old address — and, finally, send a “friend” request to your student. If he or she denies your request, do the above process in reverse, and then start over again. With a new email address.
It’s going to be a great school year!
Yours,
The District
Brian Pinaire is an editor, consultant, author of the three best books you’ve never read, former college professor, and lifelong fan of school administrators. You can read his published articles and buy his books at www.brianpinaire.com.
