Reply to There Needs to Be Enforced Equity Among PTA's

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Reply to "There Needs to Be Enforced Equity Among PTA's"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Our PTA does a lot admittedly but it also does a lot for the poorest school in MCPS from coat drives to fund sharing. Kneecapping the "rich" schools will hurt the poorer ones first. [/quote]

I get what you're saying but a coat drive and a 5 or even 10% portion of PTA funds being transferred (and are you even donating that much?) is hardly a drop in the bucket for a hyper-segregated school. This is not a good faith solution to systemic issues though I recognize the kind spirit behind the effort. The truth is that these programs and supplies should be provided for by the state. Funding schools via property taxes, which obviously vary by the size of the tax base, just perpetuates inequality and injustice. We need to be advocating for systems-wide changes instead of using enormous PTA budgets as a band-aid that only helps kids who generally already have means and advantages.

The reason why economically diverse schools work is human psychology . . . we will always notice injustice and work harder when it comes to our own kids. We can try to treat those poor kids at another school the same, but the fact that we're allowing those kids to be clustered in an over-stressed and under-funded environment kind of belies the fact that we really don't.

Case in point: my affluent, highly white neighborhood was zoned out of a majority white, non Title 1 school into a majority Black, Title 1 school a few years ago. We were some of the only people who switched instead of moving or going private. (The school is great, BTW.) But in the lead-up to the school board vote, this other neighborhood, even whiter and more affluent than mine, was also proposed to be rezoned, and those parents worked themselves into a frenzy doing turkey drives and coat drives for the poor school they didn't want to send their kids to. They even made a website with "research" about why the rezoning would be detrimental (all laughable and easily countered by local school integration professors) and they promised that they would keep supporting the school forevermore. To their great relief, they were not rezoned, and guess how long those turkey and coat drives lasted after they didn't have anything to prove?  :| [/quote]

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