Trevor Laffan: Enjoy the break... because the school run is hell on wheels!

A lady called Angie Schmitt wrote a piece in an American publication, The Atlantic. In it, she described the morning school run in Florida.

She observed that if you were to stop by an elementary school during mid-morning, you’d be likely to find a site of relative calm. Students in their classroom cutting away at construction paper, kids enjoying themselves out in the playground, or off-key musical instruments bellowing through a classroom window.

Come at drop-off, though, and you’ll probably see a very different picture: the school perimeters thickening with jigsaw layers of sedans, minivans, and SUVs.

A Florida resident told ABC News about the havoc near her home. “You’re taking your life in your own hands to get out of here. Between 8am and 8.30am and 2.30pm to 3pm, you don’t even want to get out of your house. It’s daily punishment.”

I feel her pain. You don’t have to cross the Atlantic to find chaos at school opening and closing times either. School runs here have become a thing of nightmares.

Thankfully, the schools are shut at present - meaning we get some respite from the weekday drop-offs - but you can bet as soon as late August comes around, the ordeal will begin again.

My memory is poor at the best of times, but I was trying to remember if there was such a thing as a school run when I was in primary school and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t.

As kids, we all either walked or cycled to school back in the 1960s, regardless of the weather.

We dressed appropriately for the conditions and we somehow managed to survive. I can remember sitting at my desk on many occasions in wet trousers after getting a soaking on the way in and I never died of pneumonia.

In some of the classrooms, a large central heating pipe ran along the wall above the level of the skirting board, and on a really wet day, that would be top heavy with kids sitting on it trying to dry off and get some heat into the bones. You could see the steam rising from the damp clothes.

Getting a spin to school wasn’t an option for most kids anyway. There weren’t as many cars around in those days so if you did get a lift, it probably meant you sat on the crossbar of some guy’s bike.

Things had changed by the time my own kids reached school going age.

We lived out in the countryside and the school was a fair distance away - too far for their little legs to carry them, so we had a school run. Looking back on it now, though, I can’t say bringing them to school was very traumatic. But it is now.

The school runs I had with our grandkids before they moved Down Under were unlike anything I had experienced previously.

Dropping them off at the school in the morning and collecting them in the afternoon stressed me out. There were many times when my heart nearly stopped.

Their primary school was located on the side of a busy street, so parking was a problem. The only option was to pull up as close to the school entrance as traffic would allow and let them hop out and run the gauntlet of passing traffic.

There was danger everywhere, with hundreds of children all heading in the same direction, crossing the street from all angles. Many with hoods up and totally blind to the cars around them.

It was even more hazardous on a windy day when they couldn’t hear the noise of the car engines either.

The afternoons were worse. Watching the children spilling out from school with cars parked on either side of the road and traffic speeding in both directions used to make my blood run cold.

To have any hope of finding a parking spot, you’d need to turn up an hour before collection time, and I often did when picking them up on a wet day.

I hated those school runs with a passion.

In Australia, I was reintroduced to the school run. I brought and collected the three grandchildren a few times while we were in Brisbane. It was actually a pleasant experience, especially when I got used to the route.

There was a small bit of stress initially, when I worried I might take a wrong turn and end up losing them in the Outback, but that was short- lived.

The pre-school young Archie attended had plenty of parking spaces and that made life very easy. Getting into the premises was a bit like trying to gain entry to Fort Knox but that’s how it should be.

The keypad at the front door was the first obstacle. Once inside, another code had to be entered on a touch screen before you could go any further.

But it was a user-friendly system, and some of the staff began to recognise me after a while.

I never witnessed any madness by parents or chaos caused by bad driving either, so all in all there was no pressure. It was all very civilised.

The primary school the two older boys went to was next door. So, after dropping Archie off, it was just a short walk with the other two lads.

There was a lollipop man on duty outside the gate there and I could never pass him without having a chat. He was originally from the UK but living in Brisbane for donkeys’ years and loved it.

He was nearly 80 but could easily pass for a man 20 years younger. He put that down to the Australian lifestyle and was even trying to encourage me to apply for a position. They were short-staffed.

Whatever about doing that job in Oz, I could never do it here, even if I was on the breadline and down to my last cent. Facing that chaos every day would only shorten my life, unlike my friend in Brisbane.