Scheduling Hiccups Leave Parents Angry At Broward Co. School, Again
DANIA BEACH (CBSMiami/The Miami Herald) – School starts Monday, but a Broward County School is off to a rough start, again.
According to CBS4 News Partner, The Miami Herald, Dania Beach's Olsen Middle School botched the creation of student schedules.
The problem left parents waiting in long lines, Friday, for hours to correct the errors.
The paper reports the crowd filled the school's cafeteria and media center.
Celia Ogrodowski told the paper she overheard a school staffer suggest it might be time to call police to keep order.
"I'm like, whoa, wait a minute, what kind of school is this?" Ogrodowski told the paper.
After arriving at noon, 12-year-old son Dylan at 3 p.m. still was waiting to fix a class schedule that inexplicably included two periods of the same math class, but no first-period class whatsover.
"I was confused," Dylan commented to the paper.
Broward spokeswoman Tracy Clark did not return The Miami Herald's calls for comment.
This is reportedly the fourth year of scheduling issues at the school.
Olsen teacher Terry Preuss, who is also the school's union steward, told the paper a student last year went without a science class until around April. Even stranger, the school kept issuing the young girl report cards as if she had a science class, and it gave her repeated Fs for the non-existent class.
"Her parents were very upset about that, her parents were actually punishing her," Preuss told the paper. "She kept trying to explain to her parents that she didn't have a science class."
"Eventually," Preuss said. "They did believe her."
As Olsen has been losing enrollment, so too has the Broward school district as a whole — often to competing charter schools.
The trend threatens the district's long-term survival, and Broward recently spent about $40,000 to hire the Disney Institute, in hopes that Disney could offer advice on improving customer service.
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