Surviving the Public System

I have had my first annoyance with the public school system.  Actually, beginning the week BEFORE school even started, we had a problem.  We picked up Stephanie's schedule, paid for the gym clothes, and paid/had taken school pictures.  We asked her counselor to decode a couple classes and learned that they had put her in a special tutoring English class if you marked a language other than English is spoken at home.  Huh?  I never marked that on the registration papers!  No, we do NOT speak only Spanish at home!  The counselor looked at Steph and said that must have been a mistake and she would get her out of it by the first day of school.  Ok fine.
The other classes were pretty straight-forward.  Geography, 9th grade English, PE, Physical Science, art (instead of the remedial english), and basic math.  Basic math turned out to be mostly older kids (nice...) that have already attempted this exact class previously.  It is called pre-algebra but they do not use the textbook because "too many kids fail with it" so the teacher writes problems on the board.  Ok.  I question this class because on the transcripts I wrote up for the school, I listed Algebra 1 as completed.  Apparently, they don't bother to look at this or perhaps she'd have been placed in a different class.  I called the counselor and discussed this with her, saying she already had Alg. 1 last year and it was agreed that she could repeat it this year as she had some trouble with it.  The counselor did contact the math teacher but nothing happened for over 2weeks.  I was getting frustrated.  Stephanie was too.  I tried calling the counselor several more times, only to get her voicemail and no returned calls.  Steph asked the math teacher about it and he said that her parents need to call constantly.  He had given her a few algebra problems to do and she got most of them correct and said yes, you should move up.  I finally tried a third time, right after school on Wed. and got through to the woman.  She said she would get the transfer started and Steph could pick up her new class schedule the following morning.  Yay!  Progress!
Thursday a.m. comes and could the woman find the printed schedule for Steph?  Of course not.  She was told where to go, was given the transfer paper for us and both teachers to sign, and off she went.  The teacher of the class they transfer out of is to give a transfer grade that will be the current grade for the new class.  She was given an A+!  Good for her!  Finally, moving forward.  I hope it is smooth sailing from here on out!
On more exciting public school notes, auditions for the fall play were held last week.  Steph was the last one to audition that day and found out yesterday that she did indeed get a chorus part!  Better than nothing!  Yay for her!  She is very excited for this!  The show is Our Town.
Speaking of friends, she has made a few already but was happy to meet up with friends from youth group.  She only had to eat lunch alone the first day.  And she survived :-)