February 23, 2007

Moms Gone Wild

There's an amazing article in the Gray Lady today about the latest in PTAs--stay-at-home ex-investment-banker mothers applying "business models" and assorted corporate techniques to elementary school PTAs. Here's a sample:
In Livingston [NJ], the PTA at the Collins School sends out a fat packet about its 55 committees to all new kindergarten families. Some have questioned why a school with 426 students needs so many committees; as one mother pointed out, the House of Representatives runs an entire nation with fewer than half that number (then again, there are all those subcommittees).
This sort of thing happens in affluent suburbs and BoBo towns where intense, hovering mothers with too much of the wrong kind of education take time out from watching The View to engage in this kind of activity.

Of course, PTA madness isn't new. In my Stone Age elementary school days the choice of a PTA President was a cat-and-dog fight. One year my father was outraged because a whispering campaign was started about how awful it would be if the new PTA President turned out not to be Jewish. (Oy vey!)

Whatever became of "Where did you go?" "Out." "What did you do?" "Nothin'." It would be nice if these bourgeois obsessive-compulsives would let their kids alone for five minutes.

This will happen sometime after Congress ends corporate welfare and before the moon turns bloody red.

1 comment:

Dr. Deb said...

We call them "helicopters"