Steve Koss comments on PTAs to be neutered under new policy

Auctions, raffles would be banned; Dept. of Education employees forbidden to hold offices

From Staten Island Advance, posted on Norms Notes: PTAs to be neutered under new policy


Steve Koss responds:

This is beyond insane, reflecting a power-crazed school administration gone completely delusional. They are apparently so paranoid, they cannot tolerate the notion of an independent, well-functioning parent body seeking to help their children's schools recover from the non-stop educational and budgetary knee-capping being administered from Tweed.

I'm truly sorry that I'm no longer a PA officer, as I had been for the previous two years. Were I still President of my son's school's PA, I (and my board) would deliberately act in opposition to every one of these "policies" and dare the DOE to do something about it. I'm sure their P.R. machine would love the publicity of seeing a parent being "fired" from his son's school on the grounds that he was trying to sell cupcakes or organize an auction. That would look great in the Daily News, NY1, and probably Rachel Maddow or Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

When will parents finally wake up and say, "Enough is enough!" to this nonsense? There's only one acceptable response to all this, and that's to ignore it entirely and dare the DOE to do something about it. If I still could, I'd not only do so, I'd rub it in their faces. I've never seen anything so outrageous -- lucky for Klein he's the superintendent of the parent/sheep of NYC public schools and not a district in Long Island or Westchester. If he tried something like this in a community with real parent involvement, he'd be run out of town on a rail in a matter of weeks, if not days or hours.

Steve Koss