Whom Do the School Car Pool Rules Benefit

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So who are those school car pool rules made for anyhow? When my children attended elementary school, I dutifully read through the list of guidelines for ‘parent pickup’—that snaking line of idling cars lining up each afternoon before dismissal to gather their offspring. Arriving occasionally to pick up one child or the other, I was appreciative of the teacher monitors keeping an eye on the kids and opening and closing the car doors. Naively, I thought that all of those guidelines and the monitors were meant to control the exuberance of the students after dismissal and keep them well behaved and waiting patiently before hopping into the minivans, suburbans and the occasional sedan. Well once I was introduced to the middle school car pool line I found out the truth. Those rules had nothing to do with keeping the kids in line; they had everything to do with keeping the parents in line.

The middle school car pool line is a regular free for all approach to dropping of and picking up students. You would think that most drivers, having come up through the ranks of elementary school parent pick-up lines, would be conditioned to follow some basic guidelines. But apparently this new found freedom is too much of an enticement to create one’s own plan. Like the pioneers establishing their own governance, middle school parents create their own rules in the pick-up line. Our line has the added benefit of being a closed loop with exiting cars frequently choosing to cross over entering traffic. This novel system frequently produces gridlock with all of the cars held up from exiting the loop.

Here are several commonly followed practices you can try that are sure to invoke gridlock each afternoon in the carpool line (while of course simultaneously raising my blood pressure as I watch in disbelief at the absurdity of some of the drivers).

• Do not move forward to fill all available space. Instead stop directly next to your child who certainly wouldn’t want to walk 40 feet to the car.
• After loading passengers, be sure to rearrange the entire contents of your car before moving forward out of the line.
• Talk on your cell phone in line becoming completely distracted and don’t even bother moving forward with the line of cars.
• Simply avoid going in the line in the first place. Your child is clearly more important than any other student and your time is more valuable than all of the other parents’ in line. Pull around all of the other cars, and proceed to impede all traffic flow while your child saunters over to the car.

And these are only a few of the myriad of the approaches to creating gridlock that have indeed been attempted, often successfully, by middle school car pool drivers. Perhaps we need an extra year or two in the elementary car pool lane.