conuly

They divided the class in half for the first two days. An hour each today, an hour and a half tomorrow, a half day with the full class the day after, and then on MONday they have a full day of school. Grown-ups can stay for the first two (three?) days.

She looked very cute in her uniform, but I'm so upset about that.

See, I ordered most of their stuff from French Toast. The quality is good. However, it wasn't gonna come in the mail until today, so I stopped by Kids Place by Pathmark to get a few outfits each for the first day of school. (I swear to god, I only meant to get each of them a shirt, a jumper, and some socks. Maybe a few shorts. My mother went WAY overboard on the socks, though.)

There were a very few outfits that had their school logo on them, so we picked them up. (Funnily enough, at least three other elementary schools on the island have dolphins in their logo. And come to think, there's a dolphin fountain over at the beach as well. I know we're an island, but dolphins? Really?) A logo'd jumper for each of them.

Now, French Toast has a program where if you order from their website or a catalog and give your school's code, they'll send 5% back to the school. And your school can even set it up that they can put the logo on the clothes for you. I mentioned this to the principal and assistant principal last year, though I'm confident they didn't really hear me. (I'd be more irked, but given that it was only today I found out which was which, and that was by ASKING, I'll forgive them.) But they decided to use a different company... which (aside from having supply issues and apparently a lot of rudeness) just decided to outsource part of the work to French Toast anyway (the other half the products - same price - were from another company. I'll get to that.) So there's all this money that could've gone to the school, and it didn't. (And unlike the boxtops4education bit - and I'll still gladly accept any you mail my way! - this is stuff we buy. Yearly.)

So each kid got a jumper with the logo, as I said. Ana's came from French Toast. Evangeline's didn't. And the difference in quality is noticeable. Ana's has an embroidered logo - Evangeline's was ironed on, and so badly it damaged the fabric and is already peeling slightly. Ana's jumper is a higher quality fabric - you can feel the difference in weight even as you pick it up. Evangeline's jumper has poorer stitching, including some accent marks on the inside which are so shoddy that the product would've looked better without them. It's just - not cool. And it was the same price.

So I told the principal and all again, and they go "Oh, we didn't know" and "Oh, I didn't know that" and I carefully refrained from I-told-you-so-ing. So now they want me to bring it up to the PTA, who had darned well better listen.