On the first day of classes at Montezuma-Cortez High School last week, most students were ready to go. Teachers were prepared to teach, the transportation department ran on schedule, and the cafeteria staff was prepared to serve lunch. Most parents had done their part, filling out the forms, paying the fees, buying clothes and school supplies.
The M-CHS administration, however, was not ready to hand out schedules. Most returning students had theirs in short order; new students were sent home to wait for a phone call.
There are many angles to this story, one of them being that the first day of school was not a surprise event. Returning students registered before the end of the 2010-2011 school year. After nearly three months of summer, schedules for those students should have been double checked, finalized and ready to hand out on Monday, if not before.
Instead, administrators said that the computer ate their hard work. One wonders whether students are allowed to use that excuse. After all, it must be occasionally true for everyone who uses a computer, although operator error plays a large role in unplanned deletions. Mistakes are made, mistakes are corrected, life goes on.
But when those miscalculations are made by administrators of a school district that had planned to ask voters to commit many millions of tax dollars to capital projects, they can turn into a very costly public-relations problem.
They also create doubt for the parents of those new enrollees who were turned away at the door. Is this really a good place to raise a teenager? Considering the role that the quality of public schools plays in attracting new employers to the area, anyone interested in economic development may wince at the message this sends. That's a lot to hang on a school schedule, but people do notice.
To borrow a phrase, we'd like to see the school perform to its full potential.
