So Now I'm Going To Pick on Parent Volunteers

So yesterday I went to my first "parent coffee" at the elementary school. It was so we could sign up to volunteer.

Now, I realize that my main experience with elementary school has been as a teacher in an urban district where kids sometimes confused thunder with gunfire, but OH MY GODDESS. I mean, I knew that in the suburbs parents actually sent in all the treats for the parties and did the setting up and stuff. I was prepared for that. And hell, even I had parents volunteer on field trips. So that's what I was expecting to do. Help with parties and field trips.

I am so freaking naive.

I also had the chance to sign up to stock the teacher's prize box, come and do crafts (where I bought the supplies) with the kids for each holiday, take photos of class events (where I would make enough copies of each photo for each kid in the photo), put together class memory books from the aforementioned photos, organize the teacher's take home story bags and several other things I can't remember.

This sign-up was separate from the PTO sign-up, where I could sign up to present art to the kids (my mom used to do that), read to the kids, organize the indoor recess games for the teachers, help with various school events, provide meals or rides for families going through illness and I can't remember what else.

I'm pretty sure that this is what happens when CEOs quit their jobs to stay at home with children.

What kills me is that there's a district not too far from here where kids rarely even get class parties. Where a lot of them don't even have photos of their families, let alone a precise record of kindergarten. Where the teachers have to organize everything themselves. Where there aren't even any field trips.

And I wonder why - with all this prodigious energy and skill - not one thing is being done for kids outside of our privileged zip code.

This is the real problem with public education in this country - shitty pay, bad preparation, immovable teachers' unions and ineffective administrators aside. No one cares about any kids but their own. And I'm not saying we all need to put in the hours at some less privileged school instead of getting to see our own kids enjoy their own Halloween party. But surely the fact that the class moms pull our names out of a hat for field trip chaperoning because so many of us want to go says that maybe some of us have some free time to spare?

Back when I was teaching, one of my colleague's classes was adopted by a high school class from the suburbs (the two teachers were friends). The high school kids basically stepped into the parent volunteer roles that aren't very easily filled by people who are single, working 2 jobs or otherwise hindered. And yeah, I was kinda jealous.

There's no reason that this couldn't be done a grander scale. If people actually cared. A friend of mine recently asked a question on Facebook;

How do you get people to care about the education of other people's children as much as they care about their own children's education???

I'd settle for half as much as their own children's education, at least for the people around here. But I sure as hell don't know.