My kids are in college now, but we still try to help out at the local comprehensive public* High School occasionally.
(Somebody’s gotta, since most of the parents of the kids bussed there every day from the inner city certainly can’t - very few city parents have the ability to get to an affluent white suburb and back, from Murder Town, on a week night. Gee, bussing is so great! Yay equality!)
There was a school/community meeting last night, which the school principal attended, along with two parents from the local area, one from the city, and my spouse, parent of two alumni. And of course the obligatory representative of elderly racist curmudgeons who haven’t got children and have dedicated their lives to sabotaging education because property taxes on the childless help pay for it. And nobody else, because all the liberals were home shouting at Trump on the Internet and all the conservatives were at home shouting at the liberals instead of getting involved in the local community and actually making a difference.
The High School principal is a notable anomaly in the local education system, since our decades long flirtation with zero tolerance tends to select for brutal sadists and mindless rule followers who will probably be revealed as paedophiles twenty years from now, but I digress.
Anyway, news from the High School!
The school has a new student, just released from the prison system, and of course ex-con children have to attend the public comprehensive High School because no magnet or charter school will take them and they aren’t wealthy enough for private school (rich kids don’t go to jail, duh). The comprehensive public schools are still trying to fulfill the social goal of educating every child to enter their doors, even though it’s increasingly difficult since magnet, charter and private schools are siphoning off all the kids who are growing up with books in their homes. Gee, School Choice is so great! Yay freedom!
The parent support association provided some more clothing for students unable to comply with the dress code due to poverty and parental neglect, which was much appreciated by the principal since that’s an ongoing problem. Don’t know how much longer that’ll happen, since unfortunately the parent support association is down to two members, probably because the parents of the children in a comprehensive public school often don’t really have the ability to be PTA moms, what with the poverty and teen pregnancy and working multiple jobs and no cars and all that.
The football team has canceled their season, although the school was (until bussing started in '78) an athletic powerhouse, because the principal was afraid that our 130 pound largest defensive lineman would be maimed by the 270 pound offensive linemen he was being lined up against (did I mention how the privileged kids whose nutritional, psychological and physiological needs are being met don’t attend comprehensive public High School?) and of course there’s the ongoing unfunded cost of getting the team players back and forth from the city (their opponents typically arriving in private SUVs with “dump Trump” bumper stickers, wielding state-of-the-art parent-supplied sporting equipment), the problem that many children are already working full time for less than minimum wage, leaving them no time for sports (or study) and so on and so forth.
There is so much broken, and so much complicity, and it makes me so angry I want to burn down all the houses of every Republican and Democratic voter, which is not a useful or achievable agenda. We are a wealthy state in a wealthy nation, and we are purposely wrecking our own future by segregating education economically, when we could easily fund the best education in the world for every. single. child.
* America. Public means taxpayer (under)funded.
