Every once in a while I start to doubt myself. I start to feel like maybe the school systems aren’t SO bad…that maybe I’ve gone a little Over The Top in my radical decision to homeschool…that maybe my mother-in-law is right (GASP!!!) and I should just go ahead and put the kids in school.
When I get those (blessedly rare) feelings, I like to go read up on the educational system in the United States. You know, just sort of check in and see how they’re doing. It is summer, after all, so school shootings are down, so maybe there’d be some good news for schools for a change. Right?
Uh…no. Here’s the first story I came across in my casual check-up on public school news:
Oregon Student Finds School’s Toilet Water Cleaner Than Drinking Fountain’s.
Basically, this kid decided to challenge a school ban on students bringing bottled water into class by conducting bacterial testing on four of the school’s water fountains and comparing it to the water sitting in the toilets in the student bathrooms. Turns out the water in the toilet is actually cleaner (eg: less bacteria) than the water emerging from the drinking fountains.
The reason bottled water was banned from classrooms, by the way, is that students were dumping out the water to make room for their vodka or scotch or whatever’s fashionable these days and bringing their cocktails to school with them. Apparently, happy hour starts WAY early in Oregon. Either that or the classes are SO BAD that you just need a little SOMETHING to get you through. And really…can you blame them?
The student developed a fancy little Powerpoint presentation and took it to the Board of Ed, and they promptly cleaned the equipment and replaced the spigots on three of the contaminated drinking fountains. (But not on that fourth one, so watch out.) The school continues to uphold the ban on bottled water, and some teachers are now providing clean water in their classrooms. So much for Happy Hour.
For me the most poignant part of the article came at the very end, when the school principal was quoted as saying:
It was a great lesson. We don’t always see things in and about the school that are in need of repair…. You’d be surprised how clean the water is in a toilet.
Somehow, to me, he sounds just a little too excited about this information. And maybe like he’s known for FAR TOO LONG just exactly how clean that water is. Which is something I’ll now be spending the evening deciding Not To Think About Anymore.
But on the brighter side of things, at least now I’ve got some pretty serious ammo the next time my mother-in-law makes any comments regarding homeschooling. All I’ll have to do is whip out this article and show it to her, and she’ll not only agree that the girls should stay away from public schools FOREVER, but she’ll probably fly out to Oregon immediately and sanitize every water fountain in every school in the state.
Just in case.
As an Oregonism, I appreciate articles like this one to point out why our public schools aren’t a good place to incarcerate children.
I wonder if it’s just Oregon?
Since I picked up strep at the school I am working in this summer, it’s not a surprise to me that there are lots and lots of germs. It’s a closed environment. ::sigh::
Every fall, when I go back to work in my regular school, I run a low-grade fever for about a month. I assume that’s my immune system gearing up for the assault, but I don’t know.
Oh, and if your mother-in-law decides to come out and clean our drinking fountains, don’t tell her where I live, ‘kay?
It’s probably not just Oregon…. (sigh) It’s probably nationwide.
Why is it that every time I sit down at the computer to read people’s blogs, the kids wander up to me and ask things like:
“Where are the umbrellas?”
(Because since it’s not raining, and we see you sitting at the computer, we thought it’d be a good idea to mess around with potentially dangerous objects.)
Like I’d actually let them know where I’ve hidden the umbrellas away.
Right.
Funny, yet disturbing. And I was just going to re-enroll Pete. Thanks for that.
Re-enroll Pete? Why? What’s up?