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March 08, 2004Damn concerned parents...
According to a Yahoo! News article, a Pennsylvanian entrepreneur wants to put 11-by-25 inch vinyl advertisements along the windows of local school buses. He's already approached 42 school districts with the plan, in which they'd get up to 40% of the gross revenue from the ads and veto power for deciding which ads were age-appropriate.
The Montour School District in western Pennsylvania has been approached with this idea, but they're still deciding if it's worth it. If approved, the advertisements will earn the district a cool $140,000. Heck, they could admit seven teachers to the ranks of the working poor for a whole school year with that kind of cash.
The local school district watchdog group (the Montour Taxpayers Organization) has a beef with the proposal, though. They don't want kids exposed to advertisements in their school bus.
MTO President Michelle Bitner says, "We as parents feel our children are subjected to an enormous amount of advertising on a daily basis and one place to keep it out of is schools and school buses."
She's right about that enormous amount of advertising that the kids are seeing each day, but I'd wager on the zany notion that maybe, just maybe, the tender kidlets are getting at least 80% of their daily exposure to advertisements on the TV(s)...at home.
That "one place to keep [advertisement] out of" that Bitner mentions is called the home. If those concerned parents let their kids watch TV, they're holding the schools to a higher standard of discipline than they themselves enforce--another example of parents foisting their duties onto schools, which could stay pretty busy with education alone if they didn't also have the social/parental obligations that fell on their shoulders for want of anybody else to pick up the slack. And if Bitner and the gang don't have TVs at home, then I don't understand why they're complaining. If the only advertising their kids see is on the way to and from school, those kids have much better odds of avoiding consumer sheephood later in life. If worst came to absolute worst, perhaps Bitner and the others could make the ultimate sacrifice and drive their own damn kids to school, if the buses offend their tender sensibilities so much.
Posted by patrick at March 8, 2004 06:32 AM
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