PTA Hell

February 9th, 2007

I went to my first ever PTA (Parent Teacher Association) last night for Micah’s school. After what felt like the meeting had gone over time, I looked at my phone, and to my horror only 23 minutes had gone by! Don’t get me wrong, the people there are doing a great service for the school. I’m just not socially minded enough to participate without cracking sarcastic remarks or huffing and puffing about the inefficiencies of it all. Cindy thought it was great, and I may even volunteer at some function or other, just so Cindy won’t give me “the look”.

I did a double take when Junko, a local Chrisitan musician stood up and talked about doing music for the jog-a-thon or was it the carnival? She’s part of the PTA, and was asking for a few men to help her as a stage crew. I don’t get it. If raising money is truly the objective why not throw an expensive dinner and raise a ton of cash in one shot rather than having all these small fund raising events that are nightmares for the volunteers? My neighbor does fund raising events for a living, and she told me that it’s easy to raise $100,000, which would be three times what the PTA raises in one year.

I was always told that it’s great to get the kids involved in the fund raising. Yeah, right. When I was a kid, I hated going around asking people to buy magazines, or getting pledges for a jog-a-thon, and all I ever got was a detention for chewing gum during a jog-a-thon, and here I was trying to raise money for my school! Go figure.