You're Invited!
It's time for the first PTO meeting of the school year.
The Simple Facts
The first Johnson Elementary PTO meeting of the 2024/2025 school year is Tuesday evening, September 10, at 6:00 p.m. in the Johnson cafeteria. There will be food and childcare, so please come! The meeting will also be livestreamed on Zoom.
Bring the kids out early before the meeting for a playdate on the little playground at 5:30. Meet and mingle with fellow parents who share your enthusiasm for PTO meetings, make friends with PTO co-chair Jill, and start getting comfortable with the idea of joining her! A significant percentage of the current PTO REGIME will be forced to turn in our badges at the end of this school year, and that means plenty of open seats on the board for you. Jill and the Johnson PTO need you!
The Annual Johnson Fall Picnic is set for Tuesday, September 24—save the date!
Do you like doughnuts? Buy Krispy Kreme at this link, and the PTO gets paid.
Do you like movies? Buy tickets for Regal Cinemas at this link, and the PTO gets paid.
The Complicated Pitch to Get You to a PTO Meeting Tuesday Night
I have, for years now, subscribed to Sunday home delivery of the New York Times. I started reading that paper in freshman year of high school in New Jersey. My biology teacher had convinced someone to send him twenty copies of the Times every Tuesday, because Tuesday was when they printed the Science section of the paper, and he wanted his students to read it every week. He wanted this because he believed that a regular reader of the Science section of the Times would have a decent handle on all the goings on in the world of SCIENCE, in a broad sort of way. I don’t remember if it worked. I do remember resenting having to write response essays to articles in the paper for my biology class, though.
Junior year, at a different high school, now in Georgia, I had an AP Government teacher who had convinced the school to pay for twenty copies of the Times to be delivered once a week, because she believed that a regular reader of that paper would have a decent handle on what was happening in United States news and politics, and at least some vague idea about what was happening in the world. She further believed it to be the civic duty of all citizens to have a decent handle on such things. This worked on me! All these years later, I think she was right in both cases. So I still get the paper.
But there are so many reasons why I should not—not least of which is that it is expensive. It is also ecologically indefensible to have yesterday’s news printed on dead trees, wrapped in a plastic bag, loaded into a gas-guzzling car, driven across town and finally (hopefully) left on the sidewalk in front of my house. I will have already read a good bit of this news on my phone, of course. And, shamefully, this expensive indulgence comes in lieu of subscribing to local journalism, which needs my support far more than the Times does, and from which I would almost certainly learn more about things that actually impact my day-to-day life and the goings on in my community.
But I still get the paper. Even though it doesn’t show up about every third week or so. Even though it shows up and it’s not the New York Times at all, but some other paper by mistake. Even though I suspended home delivery a month ago because I was tired of not getting the paper I was paying too much money for, I have now received the correct paper four times in a row. I can’t stop it! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When I have a complaint about the paper delivery (or lack thereof), I simply submit a report on the app. They credit my account, maybe attempt a re-delivery, and that’s that. Entirely frictionless, from my end. But someone downstream from the faceless app is getting an auto-email telling them that someone downstream from them screwed up. Behind the scenes of my missing paper is someone getting yelled at by their boss, because every customer credit is another payment withheld from The New York Times Company to the local printer/distributor. The Times isn’t paying them to not deliver papers, after all. So by being a Times subscriber I have harmed local journalism by sending my subscription dollars far away, and then I make it even worse by complaining about missing papers and taking money out of the pockets of the locals who print and (are supposed to) deliver my paper. But I like getting the paper! Sheesh!
You’re probably thinking—if you have made it this far—“What in the WORLD does this have to do with the Johnson Elementary Parent-Teacher Organization,” and that is a fair question. It’s such a good question that it very nearly stumped me, and I was the one who became convinced, looking at this morning’s paper, that somehow the successful delivery of the paper that I tried to stop from coming to my house a month ago was the right hook for this newsletter. But I remember now!
So much of what I interact with in my daily life is extremely far removed from my actual experience of living here, in this city, in my neighborhood, in my house. I read the national paper of record. When I have a problem with the delivery, I pull up the app, never interacting with a single human. I shop at Wegmans—the local hometown grocer of Rochester, New York—and usually go through the self-checkout. Costco and Amazon cover the bulk of the other stuff we need. The supercomputer in my pocket means I’m constantly available to my friends and family (and countless strangers)—who are scattered all over the country—and therefore have limited time and capacity for socializing in real life. The Times and its expensive, impersonal, non-local frictionless-ness is emblematic of my whole modern life, in other words. I get a lot out of it, but it is very disconnected from what I think of as a good human life. A life that is connected to those around me, here.
My way out of that disconnection—my way of trying to find a way into my community, the place where I live and where my kids are making their lifelong friends and learning how to be in the world—has been coaching little league baseball and working with the Johnson PTO. What in the world the Times has to do with the Johnson PTO is that the PTO (and little league baseball) are the opposite of “expensive, impersonal, non-local frictionless-ness.” Cheap, personal, local, friction. The good friction. The friction that changes things for the better for the people that matter most—the ones you live with, here.
So that’s my extremely long shaggy-dog way of asking you to come to the Johnson cafeteria on Tuesday evening for a PTO meeting. You will not leave with a better handle on things going on far away from here, but if you have a complaint or comment or thought about what can be done better right here in our school, you can say it right to Jill’s or Laura’s friendly face. We don’t have one of those frictionless apps, yet.