Do you feel your child’s school organises for fundraisers a bit too often? Do the donation reminders from school irritate you, especially because education in New Zealand is supposed to be government funded?
Well, you are not alone. Poorvi has been on the same boat since she arrived in this country. She had learnt before her arrival that education was free for school-going children. But since she arrived she has lost track of the number of fundraisers that the school invited the parents to, along with their children.
Almost every second week, there is a letter in the child’s bag asking for a gold coin donation in exchange of sausage sizzles and ice-blocks, during lunch-time. Really good timing, given that that’s when the children would open their lunch boxes to eat. Instead, the aroma of grilled sausages would drift towards them and they wouldn’t want to eat their cold home-packed lunches anymore.
Poorvi doesn’t approve of her child having sausages (because she feels it is not healthy meat) or ice-blocks (because of the cold, windy and often damp weather). As such, she didn’t send the gold coin with her child. Often, she would hear that a teacher or another parent bought her child a sizzle or an ice-block, because apparently her child was looking forlornly at the barbecue grill.
Poorvi could only seethe in rage and frustration. “Can I not spare a dollar for my child? Why can’t these people understand the true sentiments behind the deprivation?” she would wonder among family and friends.
Over the years, she has given up on logic and succumbed to the fortnightly fundraiser sausage lunches, although she has been fighting buying books at the school book fairs. These purchases can be done during the book fair or even otherwise from the school library. But what was worrisome was the price of the books – each is priced almost double the retail price one would pay at a bookstore.
The reason behind the promotion of books: to raise funds. But then, books are a much better option to the boxes of Cadbury’s chocolate bars that the school tries to push on the kids quite cleverly for fund-raising.
But something happened recently that re-ignited Poorvi’s frustration. The play areas, especially under the jungle gyms, at school have bark chips strewn for padding.
One day, Poorvi’s child was swinging on the monkey bars when she lost balance and fell off onto the bark chips and got a deep gash on her back close to the spinal cord. It took a while, but eventually healed.
An agitated Poorvi wrote an email to the school principal, informing her about the gravity of the accident and asking why the school not have rubber mats instead of the bark chips under the jungle gyms. The bark chips have pointy ends and if somebody falls on them, they hurt quite badly. That’s exactly how her child got the injury.
Guess what the principal wrote back? She said that as per the funding that the school has, the bark chips are the best they can afford. And she also claimed that these bark chips are considered child-friendly and safe by New Zealand standards. She even attached a couple of reports on the safety of bark chips in playgrounds.
What can one say after such forceful argumentation? Who wants to create an unpleasant situation at school when she could not change her child’s school at short notice? It is the only high decile school within their zone.
However, Poorvi could not help but question where was the funding raised at fundraisers getting invested? Pat came the reply from the principal: “To build more classrooms in place of the existing ones.
They are, after all, old and rundown.”
Whoever said safety comes first was definitely not thinking!