The PTA – Parents, Teachers and Assholes.
A rant by FarTreker.
I attended a PTA meeting tonight, assuming that I would have the opportunity to listen to my friends little daughter sing in the chorus. I assumed the meeting would consist of interested parents, educated teachers, combining benevolently to discuss the health, welfare and education of the kids with the school staff. The choir, I assumed, would open the meeting with a cute song or two and I could then slip out.
I’m not a joiner. People who clump together in clubs and associations mystify me. They remind me of Lemmings and sheep. The SDMB is the closest I have come to a ‘club’ in decades and that’s only because I don’t physically meet anyone.
I walked into this cute elementary school, just 4 years old, settled with my friend and his wife in the cafeteria and waited. People arrived. Lots of people. Too friggin’ many people because we ran out of chairs. People in such instances can’t shut the fuck up! Kids arrived also, and not those in the chorus. Across the aisle next to me sat an older, portly white man, a 6 year old Hispanic little boy and a black lady. They were a family, I discovered. Interesting, I speculated and ignored them – until the kid started mouthing off about how he wanted to leave.
I waited for mom or pop to discipline him, but all they did was shush the little whiner and he settled down some. Then the school district engineer opened the meeting with a talk about air conditioning problems – and the circus began. He carefully explained why there were difficulties, what had been and was being done to correct them.
Air conditioning these days is a dangerous subject. By the end of the meeting I came to the conclusion that the engineer did not make enough money, no matter what the school district paid him.
He had found some mold in some books in a book case against a wall. He removed them. He removed the facing of the wall and found a little mold behind it. That was being taken care of. He assured everyone that the mold found in the carpets last year was cleaned out and this year they would be steaming the carpets in every classroom with an industrial steam cleaner. He had found only a little mold in the ceiling tiles.
Cool. I used to install A/C. I know about these things. The only problem I could determine was that the school, when being built, installed an industrial a/c that was the minimum requirement for a place that size and our summers in Florida are getting hotter. Think of it like poking a 10,000 BTU window unit in your bedroom, which does a great job until the summer heat and humidity climbs out of sight. Then it struggles, doesn’t cool as well and might have problems with mold plugging it’s drains and spit a little water inside. (A splash of bleach through the cooling coils kills the mold and opens the drains.) You want better cooling, so you go out and buy an A/C unit technically too big for the room, say a 20,000 BTU. Problem solved. Hot humid summers no longer affect you. You just learn to run the thing on a lower setting or else it will freeze you out.
Mold. Get friggin’ real! In FLORIDA? The entire state is one gigantic petrii dish! We have molds here that probably have been around since the dinosaurs were crapping in the woods! Buy a loaf of bread and leave it on the table for two days in an air conditioned house and it sprouts mold! In the rainy season, outside walls of houses turn green where water splashes. Algae flourishes in any puddle of still water. Mushrooms pop up all over the place. Rocks get moldy.
Then some guy starts in, claims he’s a doctor, dressed in a pull over sports shirt, tanned too much to spend much time in the office, with a smart assed expression on his face. He holds up a fiber tile he took from a classroom containing 3 circular black water/mold stains on the underside. He states he took the moldy tile and found several others and essentially, stated how hazardous this was to the children. Next to him, a cute teacher suddenly springs to life as Bitch incorporated, holds up books she took from a bookshelf with supposedly mold stains on them and passes them around, while sniping at the engineer about health hazards, how the a/c has been worked on for 4 years and generally joining the doc in painting a grim picture.
Things start getting out of hand, and the kid across the aisle is now whining and crying and generally being a pain in the ass as momma sits there like a stone figure and poppa tries to control the little fart. In the mean time I discover that an 8 year old boy in front of me with a short hair cut has this 12 inch long, 1/8 inch wide braid of hair running down his back from his head. I have to fight to resist the urge to cut the ridiculous thing off. Really!
Doc points out that the ‘mold’ can cause disease. The engineer tries to assure him that all has been taken care of. Doc smells blood. He asks the audience if any of their kids have come home lately sick with certain symptoms. (Curiously, all of the symptoms fall right into the general cold category.) Hands go up. An acceptable amount, I think, considering kids packed in a school have a tendency to spread bugs among each other about as rapidly as fire ignites gasoline. The engineer assures them that they have installed hepa filters in the system but the doc points out that they’ll do no good if the school is moldy. The school isn’t moldy. I’ve been through most of it. The engineer had to really look to find some. If one listened to the doc, however, one would expect to find streamers of slime oozing down the walls and blossoms of fungi sprouting from the tiles.
The engineer points out statistics showing how acceptable the absentee count in the school is. Doc’s cohort, Teacher Bitch points angrily out that kids and students often come to school sick so the figures would be off. Doc mentions gloom and potential disease over poor air-conditioning and states triumphantly that he does not want his kids sickened from school.
Dipsy blond next to hunk husband holding thin little girl asks to speak. She points out that all last week her child came home with a stomach ache from school – but she did not know about it until recently because the kid and sister hid it. She wonders if the air in the school caused it. She, herself, has allergies and bad air conditioning sets them off.
While doc is agreeing with her, I’m wondering why she is blaming the school for what is probably a cold the kid picked up off grounds, why did it take a week before she found out and why the kid has not been to the doctors yet. Then the next parent comments that his kid has come home with feeling poorly, another mentions that little Stevie had a case of the trots and wonders if fungus in the air conditioning could be the cause of it. Someone else mentions that the class rooms in a wing seem too humid at times and the engineer explains about additional outside humidity – which kind of goes over their heads.
I’m also noticing that no one else who gets up to talk, concerned about the a/c, happened to recall that kids get sick a lot in elementary school, usually from other kids, so they cannot blame the a/c for 100% of the illnesses. Then some lady gets up and states that her daughter frequently gets a headache when she gets to school that lasts until she comes home. Doc nods wisely. Of course he never mentions the possibility that the child has a stress problem with school.
Pot bellied – and I mean pot bellied – redneck in shorts, scraggly beard, baseball cap, straw-like blond hair too long for his age sticking out from under it like stuffing from a ruptured mattress, gets up. Belligerent. Essentially he says that by damn his kid aint going to go to no school what makes him sick and he wants something done about it now, like yesterday. Fat, loud wife agrees with him.
Engineer is overwhelmed. He has lost control. Stupidity has gained control in the room. Parents are convinced that the school is becoming toxic. Doc sits back and only adds his comments when the fire starts to die down and I’ve begun to loath him. Obviously a real pain in the ass. The SOB knows that a/c ducts leak moisture some times, which hits the tiles. He also knows that the kids who get sick are most likely not sick from anything generated in the schools a/c.
I see one parent get the ‘moldy’ book, look at it, sneers at the doc and drop the thing on the floor. He doesn’t pass it on. He knows it’s bullshit. I think I like him. An island of sanity in a stormy sea of parental stupidity.
I realize that I am observing first hand the true example of mob thinking. I think I understand how Hitler bamboozled a nation. However, it certainly did not take much for the PTA. So many people there – who have whelped kids – and so few functional brains among them.
Finally, the principal wearies of the engineer being eaten alive and stops the insanity. At last, the chorus is going to come out. First a little meeting while the now beet red, tight lipped, grossly underpaid engineer makes his exit. I hoped he was headed for a bar. He certainly deserved it.
Kid across the aisle is now smacking, punching, pinching and pulling hair out of dads chest. Dad just quietly fends him off half heartedly while mom still sits there like one of those polished wooden black native carvings from Africa. I resist the urge to go over there and smack the kid across his head. People have begun to notice.
The chorus comes in. Hooray! After the songs I can flee this moronic accumulation of parents – who have given me a clear understanding of why our kids are shooting each other. Around 20 cute 8 year olds stream in and assemble in front of the stage, my friend’s daughter among them, and a ghetto blaster starts playing and they start singing – well, sort of, but they made a good go of it. A few seconds into the song, the nimrod kid across the aisle starts hooting and hollering, jumping up and down in the aisle, waving to a friend of his in the chorus and yelling for them to sing faster. He wants to boogie. I want to squash him like a bug. His parents ignore him. Obviously the little bastard has a problem, but just as obviously the folks could have taken his little ass out of the building.
Other parents notice – how could they not. I start popping off comments like suggesting certain parents should control their kid and get told to quiet down by my friend. The little monkey in the aisle hoots and hollers. I observe rather loudly that he needs disciplining with a 2X4 and parents around me looked shocked, but the daddies grin in agreement. Even the goofy pigtailed kid in front of me is pissed. I ask my friend, not exactly in a low voice, if he would mind squashing that bug for me and he replies that he would like to.
The fat redneck with the big mouth and grassy hair glares at me and at the kid. Yeah, like he never raised one of his hams to his little darling and no doubt was seriously considering shoving one of his size 14 sneakers up the dancing urchin’s ass.
The kids parents pull him back where they are, but he continues to hoot and wave. Finally, after two songs, it’s all over. I can’t stand it. No wonder the American school systems are fucked. I watch, somewhat amazed, as two parents, each weighing in at over 300 pounds, waddle across the room. I couldn’t spot their kid, and I’m just as glad. The guy has a head like the old wad cutter 38 caliber reloads. At least his is in proportion to his body. She has a small head, short hair, that looks like a baseball sitting on top of a watermelon which has been stood on one end.
Neither look happy. I leave and on my way out I pass the doc, who is getting a petition signed about the a/c and I pause to wait to ask him if it ever dawned on his pea brain that kids get sick from other things besides a/c but my friend drags me away. I bid congratulations to his daughter outside, then as soon as I can, I flee.
Democracy in action. No wonder we keep voting in crooked congressmen.
I don’t think I’ll be going to anymore PTA meetings.