School Eliminates Parties

(Groveport, Ohio) Christmas, Halloween, and Valentine's Day parties are now prohibited at the Glendening Elementary School. Birthday parties are also scrapped. So, what's the genius thinking behind this mandate?

Principal William Sternberg said about 15 percent of the student population doesn't participate in the parties because of personal beliefs. He said the teachers think the classroom gatherings take away valuable instructional time.

Evidently there are two reasons for prohibiting the continuation of school traditions. The first is political correctness. Since 15% of the students (I think that number was pulled out of the air, by the way) don't participate because of personal beliefs, the parties are canceled. This is dumb even if the 15% number is valid. You could easily get 15% of the population of the U.S. to support canceling 4th of July celebrations. Hey, Principal Sternberg, check the dictionary. Fifteen percent is a minority and the minority position loses to the majority, that is, unless Glendening Elementary School is instituting some sort of unwritten affirmative action policy with regard to holiday parties.

The second reason cited is that teachers think parties take away valuable classroom time. Think about how lame this excuse is. At most, these parties encompass a few days out of the school year and, chances are, not even that much. After all, Christmas actually occurs during school vacation and Halloween or Valentine's Day parties shouldn't take up more than an hour or two of any one school day. Agreed, all classroom time is valuable, but taking a day or two out of a nine-month school year to boost the kids morale and to continue the traditions of the school provides more benefit than any imagined detriment because of loss of classroom time. What bothers me the most is that it appears that the teachers are trying to educate in an environment where society's cultural and social norms are ignored. They are also trying to directly link any poor performance in teaching on the fact that the surrounding community celebrates various holidays.

In summary, the kids (and they are kids, ages 6 through 10) are not going to celebrate holidays because the principal needs political correctness deprogramming and because there's a bunch of whiny teachers who are trying to blame calendar holidays for their poor record as teachers.

Mention also needs to be made about one related aspect of the current education system that puzzles me. I've watched my son's experience over the last decade in public school and have been perplexed by the number of "No School Days" set aside for teachers' meetings. I haven't actually counted them but they seem to occur almost monthly. Granted, I'm from a previous generation, but I have no recollection of frequently getting out of school so the teachers could meet. I don't know what they're meeting about, but it would seem to be taking valuable classroom time. My suggestion is to have the teachers give up a couple of their "meeting days" and let the children have their parties.