School bells ring and children sing

It's been awhile since I've had to care about this stuff, but young Edison Lee has an interesting twist on back-to-school shopping.

The kid has a way of connecting the dots in a pattern that is sometimes amusingly paranoiac and other times, well, okay, still amusingly paranoiac, but in a way that I can relate to.

There are -- or, at least there were a decade ago -- office supply stores that would promise to donate to schools during this time of year, based on what you spent. Assuming there still are, Edison has a righteous take: It incentives schools, if not to come up with more elaborate and expensive shopping lists, at least to steer parents to particular retailers.

And it's not just school supplies. At least that's only once a year.

I hate grocery stores that offer donations to schools based on how much parents spend there. Pressuring schools to pressure parents to alter their food shopping choices is unfair. If you want to support the schools, write a damn check.

Grateful parents will pay you back, to the extent they can. And some of the ones with good incomes will do it in the produce department, not by purchasing the unhealthy, sugar-laden brand-name crap being promoted by the manufacturers.

My time as a back-to-school parent wrapped up 20 years or so ago, at which point asking kids to provide Kleenex and reams of copy paper was still something of a novelty and was confined to poor schools and schools in which right-wing screwballs had seized control of the board.

"Right-wing screwball" being what you could call them back then, before they became mainstream and developed into nearly the default. I worked with schools for another decade and a half following my kids' graduations and got to not only see the phenomenon up close but even to comment on it:

(Unless you have the eyesight of a superhero, you'll want to click on that for a larger version. The morning after it ran, flowers and a box of candy appeared on my desk and voters did eventually wake up and make some changes. Oh, and I still stand by the second part as well.)

Anyway, Edison cracked me up this morning. Most teachers know the difference between a "wish list" and a "shopping list," but it's hard to identify the point at which you've stopped listing actual needs and started pointing fingers at the kids whose families simply can't chip in.

The TV station I watch for local news is just concluding their annual school supply drive, and good for them, but they did call for more backpacks on their final appeals, which is a kind of a sign-of-the-times.

We didn't have backpacks, but nobody thought we should. Thank goodness we also didn't have homework in every subject every night, for instance. There were times you brought home an armload and times you brought home a couple of books, and papers we needed got folded in half and tucked into the textbooks. A spiral notebook and three texts was a normal load.

Not sure that wouldn't still work, but the backpack has been pretty strongly established as a necessity for, what, 40 years? 

The other, much newer necessity is thumb drives, which I find more curious and a little troubling. "Curious" because, yeah, most people seem to have computers at home these days.

"Troubling" because, according to this report, only 61% of Americans have Internet access. Doesn't mean they don't have computers, but, if I were teaching, I'd be a little leery of expecting kids to have a place to plug in a thumb drive, even if they got one through a program like WPTZ's.

The Digital Divide is not a new issue, but neither is it one that has been solved, and some schools that have provided laptops for students are now under fire for having done so.

I knew a school librarian back in the 1990s who applied for a small grant and then bought a dozen cheap dedicated word processors at Toys-R-Us which she allowed kids to check out overnight.

They could go home and write their papers on the machine, then come to the library the next day to download, format and print out the papers on the "real" computers in time for class.

I don't know where she is today, but I know where she's going after she dies and she won't have to stand in line to get in.

Meanwhile, it's interesting that mobile phones are much more prevalent in Africa and Asia than here, and there are significant teaching initiatives in the back country that take advantage of this.

Two things I've said in the past and will say in the future unless somebody makes them obsolete:

1. Grassroots politics doesn't mean a Twitter campaign to capture the White House. It means taking control at the local level. If the Tea Party witch hunters own your school board, it's because people who care about kids didn't step up.

2. School budgets fail because they are the only budgets that people are allowed to vote on directly. If all budgets went to referenda, we'd be in a constant state of financial lockdown. This used to be a theoretical statement, but the witch hunters have moved on beyond taking over local school boards to the next stage of populist organizing. QED.

3. It's true that, in a democracy, people tend to get the kind of governance they deserve. I'm just enough of a dreamer that I wish we'd get, despite our failures, the kind of governance our kids deserve. 

4. Oh, and here's a fundraising idea: Every time a cartoonist does a "kid with a heavy backpack" gag, he should be required to donate $100 to the local schools.

That wouldn't raise a lot of money, but it might improve the comics page.

 

(Edison creators John and Anne Hambrock are planning, and funding, a mini-con in Kenosha. Go here to help out. Even if you can't be there, they have some incentives for donating.)

Comments

[Ruth Anne in Winter Park, FL]

Excellent comments about the Digital Divide, along with all the rest, of course. This school librarian thanks you for your appreciation of the one you knew.