I was more than surprised to hear that in Germany your first three years, grades 1 – 3, are half a day long. As most grownups work a full day they came up with a nice solution which is “the Hort”. The hort is a type of after school daycare where the kids can go to after school. They are not left to their own devices on the street, but rather are in a controlled environment where they can interact with some of their friends from school, do homework and depending on the Hort, crafts and field trips as well.
Wow, this sounds great. It sure sounds like solution to a latchkey kid spending his or her time at home alone and unsupervised. Hort’s are within walking distance of the school and the students who go there usually meet as a group and walk together in pairs or groups. However, as you might imagine resources are limited, so you have to sign up. Which sounds all nice and organized until you realize that you cannot sign up any sooner than six weeks before school starts and because there is no centralized authority you don’t know where there are free places and where not. This usually yield a bunch of parents signing their child up to multiple Hort’s in order to get a free place.
My favorite part of trying to find a Hort spot for my son was finding out what happens to the waiting list. After a reasonably short period of time and without any correspondence to the parents each hort pretty much throws away the list. From what I was able to determine much after the fact was the general consensus was that after a few months all of the students must have a place. So the only way to get a spot would be to continuously call the people at all of the horts daily until you get a place. Not a very nice prospect as there is a line between “following up on” and “badgering”. If I cross that line my child will never get a spot no matter what.
The worst surprise is reserved for those who somehow manage to get through their first year with a creative use of friends and family. Once the first year is over, your child will not be put into any of the Horts until all of the children from current year have found a place – yup if you can’t get a place the first year you are pretty much locked out of the system. Sure some places may show up but oddly enough that is usually at the Horts who have incredibly lackluster reputations.
It was actually a few years later that it became obvious why all of the Horts were full. I had managed to have a child during a bit influx of children which exceeded the amount of children when compared with previous years. This information came home in spades when we had to try and find a high school that was not overfull or one that was an hour away from home.