Bureaucracy FAIL

[unixronin]

I will never understand the reasoning that drives the local elementary school to send home field trip permission forms that not only require me to fill out anew for each field trip medical information that the school nurse's office already has on file, but also require me to fill out destination, date, time, and trip cost information from the front of the form TO ELSEWHERE ON THE FORM before returning the form to the school.  WTF is the POINT of the school requiring me to inform the school of data that the school has just proven to me that it already has?

The medical information, I can almost understand; some of it (the insurance, say) could have changed, and we could have forgotten to notify the school.  But even that section could be marked "Fill out this information if there has been a change" — then the teacher could just glance at that section and, if any of it is filled out, know the nurse's office needs to be informed of the change, and otherwise just go with what's on file.

But making me fill out the back of the form to tell the school information it just told me on the front of the form?  That's a ludicrous waste of everyone's time.  What are they going to do, accidentally send my kid on a field trip to a Titan missile silo in North Dakota by mistake instead of the Seacoast Science Center if I don't copy the information from the front to the back?

Comments

[continued]

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

-If something comes up where the school needs to contact all the students on a particular field trip (okay, now WHO scheduled the trip to Chernobyl!?!) the don't have to scan through each student's records - they have all the forms for a single trip all bundled together.

And they don't have the permission slips now?

ou see - you _can't_ carry over the forms from one ectivity to the next.

Yes, you CAN. It's more efficient to just track the changes — centrally — than rebuild the entire database by hand every time you want to use it. That's almost the worst of all possible solutions.

You're just grumpy 'cause you actually had to do some work. ;)

Actually, no, I'm "grumpy" that the school is using a horribly wasteful and inefficient system of managing this information that makes more work for almost everyone involved, to no demonstrable gain, and creates a high probability of information loss. How many medical information updates never make it to the school nurse because the teacher missed the "This is an update" box — or the parent forgot to check it?

This is an awful solution. It should be fixed.