Joe,
I'm currently a MBA student at The University of Tampa and, knowing the
university bureaucracy well, I can tell you that what your son went
through is normal.
He is not high school graduate for now and therefore require a special
permit to attend college level classes.
Every college/university has its own procedures in this kind of
situation, unfortunately most of the time does not count the fact that
the candidate already took some classes in a university settings
somewhere else.
Usually, those requirements are put in place to ensure a minimum of
quality control about the student population. In my experience, those
practices re pretty common across the US, no matter where you are.
Federico
PS. $200 is a very good price to me.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: slug@lists.nks.net [mailto:slug@lists.nks.net]On Behalf
> Of Brother
> Timothy
>
> Gnorb;
>
> I read your message and my son who is 14 and I trotted over
> to HHC to enroll for the Unix administrators class. Let me
> tell you a not so pretty story.
>
> First, I am 66 years old so I don't need college credit. I
> tried to sign up to audit the class but was told I had to
> wait until the day after the class started to see if there
> was an opening for me. No problem, paying customers always
> come first, free loaders get in line.
>
> Next my son. My son is 14 years old. He will be attending
> the CAT (Center for Advanced Technology) at Lakewood High
> School in St. Petersburg this year as a freshman. The CAT
> school is a magnet school for kids who are good in math,
> physics,chemistry and computers. Enrollment is by lottery,
> with the kid's who have the best grades being accepted first.
>
> My son writes programs in Basic, C and C++. I'll brag that
> he writes some of the nicest code I have seen, well commented
> and efficient. Recently he has also become good at
> programing in Macromedia Flash and Active X. He runs SuSE
> 8.0 and OpenBSD on different drives on his computer which he
> also built.
>
> When he was in the 7th grade we lived in Alaska and he
> attended the University of Alaska Anchorage for a Sophomore
> class in "C" Programing. He got a "B". The reason I'm
> including all this information is to establish the fact that
> the kid has some knowledge of computing. I thought the
> Administrators class would be ideal for him.
>
> We left my house in Clearwater at 9:30 this morning headed
> for HCC. I registered first and then it was my son's turn.
> The nice lady at the registration counter took his paperwork
> but said we needed to see an advisor. OK, off we went. The
> advisor referred us to a councilor who immediately started to
> throw up road blocks in our path. First the kid had to take
> an ACP test. Great, he's a high school freshman and he has
> to take a college placement test. It doesn't seem to matter
> that he has performed well in a university setting before.
> Next, he has to get a letter from his high school granting
> permission for him to take this class. Then finally, he has
> to go before a review board and see if they, (in their
> infinite wisdom) will allow me to spend some $200 to have the
> kid take a class with me.
>
> You know, I moved to Florida from Alaska last year. I know
> you guys in the "lower 48" as we used to refer to the
> continental US are bogged down in bureaucracy but is this normal?
>
> HCC doesn't sell merchandise as far as I could tell. That
> only leaves one thing they can sell which is a service.
> Selling a service requires people to whom to sell the
> service. If you make it difficult, almost impossible, for
> people to avail themselves of the service which you are
> selling, you usually don't stay in business very long, unless
> of course you happen to be a government agency.
>
> I ask you guy's what harm is there in my spending $200 for my
> kid to sit in a classroom and learn something about Unix? If
> he can't pass the course, who is harmed? And finally, is
> this the way things are done around here all of the time?
>
> Joe Ryan
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