Moving On Up

Moving On Up! At least my son is. He’s in the ninth grade this year and one of his courses allows him to earn college credit at the local community college. We just have to register him like any other college student and he earns dual credit between the high school and the community college. It’s a pretty sweet deal if your child is taking a class he enjoys and will do well with. He only earns the credit if he has a passing grade and it will affect his GPA with the college if he continues taking courses with them, but still a nice step ahead for child looking toward college.

 The only difficulty I we faced was proving he lived in our county for over a year. To prove residency you need to prove a photo ID and a piece of mail with your name and current address with a date stamp over a year ago on it. Not an issue if you are a licensed driver who pays bills. A much larger issue if you are a fourteen year old ninth grader. So I called the county clerk responsible for issuing residency forms and explained our position expecting some form of exception to be in place for minors. Wrong. She was firm about the rules. It didn’t matter if he was 14, the process was the process. Gotta love bureaucracy.

She did finally agreed that his school ID he uses for his lunch would work for his photo ID but the item of mail was more problematic. We searched the house high and low for a piece of mail from a year ago with his name on it. He just doesn’t get mail. Even his birthday cards are handed to him by family at his yearly party! We looked for magazine subscriptions, but even his gamer magazines come in the parent’s name. His old report cards would have worked but there weren’t any in the house that were old enough to qualify. It was killing me that to think that he could achieve a goal that would help set his college future in motion and we were being stymied by a single piece of non-existent junk mail!

 Totally frustrated, I sat down, pulled out his ‘baby book’ (a photo album filled with pictures, papers and things we think represent treasured memories during his life) and immediately, out fell a letter. His English teacher had entered a poem he had written into a writing contest and this was the letter informing him he had won. Miraculously, it was address to him AND dated last year. We had even kept the envelope it came it. Now how weird was that? So today after school we will present our found treasures to the county treasurer (ironic, right!) and hopefully have him registered for his first college course at age fourteen. Could this actually be the same kid I was worried about making it through grade school?

I think I’m going to like this school year! And I will admit, I’m going to be hoarding all his papers from now on.