"Haven't they gone far enough?"

school fundraisers, plastic junk, ritual humiliation

When Bea entered kindergarten, two years and a lifetime ago, a few things happened almost right away: she fell in love with her teachers, she fell into a pile of fire ants on the playground (she barely cried, she told us), and she came home talking about Boosterthon, her school’s annual fundraiser. We needed to sign up! If we signed up online we could make a special “Student Star” video and send it to all our friends! We needed to do it right away, so she and her class could wear pajamas to school, get extra recess, and earn super-cool prizes!

“You can ask Mamie and Grampa and Nana and Grandpa,” I told her. We didn’t make the student star video, as far as I remember, but we donated, her grandparents donated, and she came home with a bunch of plastic toys that broke immediately.

Since then we’ve been thinking more about plastic toys destined for landfills and the ocean, and we’re not alone. LEGO is prototyping bricks made from recycled plastic (pretty late to the game, aren’t they?). Even McDonald’s is phasing out plastic toys (ditto). At this year’s PTA kickoff meeting, I mentioned that we don’t want more plastic coming into our house than necessary, and that we preferred the “no-fuss fundraiser” the school tried last spring—each class put together a donated basket of donated items from local shops, parents and grandparents bought raffle tickets. Some of the teachers even offered “P.E. teacher assistant” or “librarian’s assistant” as prizes. We enthusiastically donated, won nothing, but were happy to participate, with one hundred percent of our donation going directly to the school. A few other parents at the PTA meeting agreed: the no-fuss fundraiser was great. But that fundraiser didn’t compete with the funds raised by Boosterthon, the principal said. Especially because Bea’s school is smaller, with a smaller PTA, we needed to do Boosterthon for at least one more year.

Someone asked about Boosterthon’s cut of the money, and the principal told us—forty-nine percent. 49%! Almost half of the money we’d send in would go directly to this for-profit company, which also removes about two weeks of art, music, P.E., guidance, and media from the kids’ schedules and replaces them with pep rallies and “character education presentations” led by Boosterthon staff. I checked the Boosterthon web page, and even though they are non-essential staff that goes directly into school buildings and classrooms, there was no requirement or assurance that their staff would be vaccinated.

Yikes.

We didn’t donate this year until Boosterthon was over, and luckily Bea didn’t complain at all. But I heard from a kindergarten parent who said it was really stressful in her household, and who also objected to all the plastic crap the fundraiser produces. The culminating activity/reward is seeing their school’s principal turned into a hot dog—every kid in the school, the principal promised, would get to squirt her with ketchup, mustard, and relish.

Bea’s principal happens to have a last name that rhymes with Harriet’s teacher’s first name, and she often mixes up the two, so when I asked if Bea was going to help turn “Ms. ___” into a hot dog, Harriet was horrified. “No!” she said. “I don’t want Ms. ___ to be turned into a hot dog!”

After reassuring Harriet, Bea said she would not participate. “Haven’t they gone far enough?” she asked. Last year her beloved P.E. teacher was turned into an ice cream sundae—on Zoom, no less!—and Bea found watching kind of awful (her friend S. said it was “underwhelming”). Of course we appreciate that her teachers and principal are such good sports, and that they so want to help the school that they’ll get covered in chocolate sauce and ketchup for the cause. But… should they have to? Is it a positive learning experience for kids to see their teachers brought low with foodstuffs? Does it make sense to bring in a bunch of non-certified-teacher strangers into a school to teach kids about “teamwork, care, courage, and grit” during a pandemic, while removing ten days of their actual teachers’ lessons?

This year’s campaign at Bea’s school raised money for STEM materials, and it was successful—they met their goal, and I’m happy for them, and also sad that they have to do this. But I’m more sad, honestly, for the schools that can’t—in Brooklyn and D.C., I worked in two different schools that didn’t have PTAs at all, because our parents and teachers just didn’t have the time and resources. Both of my non-PTA schools served student populations that were nearly one hundred percent Black. Neither school had a library, and we had minimal computer, P.E., music, and science equipment. By minimal I mean: literally almost nothing.

Yet kids in an affluent part of Chatham County are coming home with garbage plastic toys, earned through a partnership with a private, for-profit company.

North Carolina has one of the most regressive school funding systems in the country (we also recently got the recent distinction, from Oxfam, of worst state for worker protection and wages). Governor Cooper is currently pushing our Republican-controlled General Assembly to fully fund our schools, as mandated by the Leandro Comprehensive Remedial Plan, and to give teachers, administrators, and school staff the raises they need and deserve.

And probably no matter what, schools will be stuck raising their own money—when and if they can.

A lot of this comes back to our horrible legislature. No one at my workplace is getting turned into a hot dog or an ice cream sundae, but we dance the same humiliating dance, avoiding a vaccine mandate that would save lives and protect our hospitals, and hoping our gerrymandered-to-hell General Assembly will minimally fund us. And it affects our teaching too—one of my tasks today is to think through how I can reorganize the last weeks of one of my classes so that we’re safer doing group work.

Here is a request:

A lot of Frog Troublers are writers and artists—if you’re one of those, and would like to use the writing community you know to organize for voting rights, consider joining Writers for Democratic Action (formerly Writers Against Trump). Our North Carolina chapter is led by champion Frog Troubler Jill McCorkle, who will join Anita Earls, Robert Reives, and Gene Nichol in conversation on October 16 for a free, Zoom event at Flyleaf Books. They’ll talk about the upcoming election and how we can work together to make North Carolina a better place to live for all of us. If you’d like more information about WDA organizing, email me. And if you know anyone who’s looking for good (paid) work, Down Home is hiring for a number of NC-based positions right now, including canvassers.

And something fun for your Sunday:

If you’re in the Raleigh area, Bea and I highly recommend the Paperhand Puppet Intervention show happening tonight at the North Carolina Museum of Art (it’s outdoors, and people were great about masking). We went on Friday and loved it.