Are We Being Punk’d?

Every school morning in Ladera Ranch there is a parade, and it is a parade: dads on hover crafts toting backpacks on their fronts, moms pulling wagons loaded with bento boxes and emotional support animals, and the rest of us inching along behind in our cars, rehearsing the small civic duties of the route, which include thanking the crossing guard for their time and remembering to ask how their mom is doing.

I’m not discovering electricity over here, but I did train for a long time to be a psychologist, and I’d like to think the hour I spend in that parade could go toward the writing and the course development that training was for. Instead I get home and the real list begins, which is to figure out how we are paying the mortgage, eat more protein, do cardio for my brain but resistance training for my bones, get enough collagen, work on my marriage, complete the twelve-step skincare routine (because self-care), check in with my mom and dad, answer the twelve text threads about whether Jimmy is wearing the blue jersey or the red one tonight, remember that it is early-out Tuesday so I am due back at school at 11:10, pack cute snacks because I am team mom for one son’s baseball team, get a hot meal into everyone because my husband is coaching the other son’s team, and above all be present, because it all goes so quick.

I know how this sounds coming from this zip code. Yes, many of us here have a higher SES, which is the clinical way of saying no one is organizing a telethon, but an affluent parent and a broke one are issued the same 24 hours, and somewhere along the way the basics of a public school day were quietly reassigned to ours.

Start with the bus, the simplest line in the math. Years ago Capistrano Unified cut two-thirds of its regular routes to keep budget cuts out of classrooms, which took about 4,500 families off the bus, and what remains is a limited set of routes at $575 a year per child. California funds school buses worse than any state in the country, and fewer than one in ten kids here rides one. When we went to school the bus was a basic right, and nobody had to “apply” for it.

The reason is less mysterious than it feels at pickup. The state’s school funding formula sends extra dollars to districts according to their share of high-need students, and about a third of ours qualify, the lowest share among California’s ten largest districts. I have no quarrel with the idea, since kids who need more should get more. But the formula has a silent second half, which is that somebody still has to drive, tutor, coach and cover the hours between the last bell and the end of a workday, and in a district like ours that somebody has been understood to be us.

Researchers who study families have a name for the part of this that never shows up on a calendar. They call it cognitive labor, meaning the anticipating, the deciding and the monitoring that sit underneath every visible task, which is why the jersey thread is more tiring than the game. In 2024 the Surgeon General put a number on where that leads: 48 percent of American parents said that most days their stress is completely overwhelming, against 26 percent of other adults.

That is what I mean when I say the math isn’t mathing. We have been handed a second job made of logistics and asked to do it gratefully, photogenically and with a hot meal, and then reminded to be present for it.

A parade is a lovely thing to attend and a strange thing to be drafted into.

So here is my ask. If you have already dug into why the buses left and what it would take to bring them back, write to us at The Bubble, because I would much rather join you than reinvent the wheel. And if you haven’t, tell us what your Tuesday looks like. We’re keeping score.

Sources: U.S. Surgeon General, Parents Under Pressure · California Department of Education funding data 2023-24 · Patch on the CUSD route cuts