Uninvolved, lazy, and uneducated parents of Florida beware:  YOU may soon receive a failing grade on your kid’s report card.

Representative Kelli Stargel (R-Lakeland) wants teachers to grade the parents of their  pre-k through third grade students.  As the Mom of an intelligent, well-prepared kiddo thriving in our public school system I am not exactly shaking in my boots.  But some parents should be.

According to the Orlando Sentinel we would be rated our ability to:

• Send back teacher’s notes and acknowledge their existence in our world
• Make sure our darlings do their homework (no matter how much they may protest) and study for tests (can you say “spelling words”?)
• Get our kids on the bus or through the carpool line regularly and on time
• Remember to feed (and water) our children and require them to get a decent night’s sleep

I’m actually pretty excited about this.  I may get a kick-ass grade for simply doing what I  do anyway.  Common sense earns a bonus.  Whoo-hoo!

But for those “other” parents– I’d bet their Lucky Strikes it won’t be the first “unsatisfactory” grade they have ever seen sent home from school. There’s always the chance that someone else calling them out on being a crappy parent might get them to put down that t.v. remote and pick up their kid’s homework assignment.  They may even get riled up enough to call the school (but most likely the news crews first) indignant and raging over being called an “unsatisfactory” parent.  But I doubt it.  These parent’s kids probably started forging their Mom’s signature on their report cards in Kindergarten.

I’m wondering if some parents will try for extra credit.  You know who I’m talking about: the helicopter moms who try to micromanage not only their kid’s lives but their classroom as well.  The nosy “I can do your job better than you” moms who volunteer in the classroom not to actually help the teachers, but to check up on them and make sure they are treating their kids like the extremely gifted, perfectly behaved, future prom king/queen and student council president they believe them to be.  Most likely, those kids will end up as stuck-up, entitled  Mama’s boys/girls still living at home at age 30, but those parents deserve to reap what they sow.  But at least their kids will have learned something in school.

The fact of the matter is, the parents who would actually care about getting a satisfactory grade on their kid’s report cards are already doing their jobs.    And the parents who refuse to communicate with the teachers, who let their kids run wild and don’t even have the time or inclination to make sure they have food on the table aren’t going to give a rat’s ass about a little piece of paper.

Most schools which receive overall failing test scores and grades don’t have a teacher problem.  They have a parent problem.   

Which is too bad for the schools.  And even worse for the kids.  They deserve better.