Word: boosterism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...telling fact that parents in Brentwood, California, can contribute $78,000 to the school's booster club for added staff, while the pta in the same school can raise only $5,000 because it is forced to turn over 20% of its profit to disadvantaged children in other areas of Los Angeles. The pta president noted that some parents objected to turning over funds to poorer schools downtown. Obviously, these parents couldn't care less about helping provide glasses for needy youngsters who can't see the print in a textbook and medical care for still others...
...ANFO, jump up and down on it, even shoot a bullet at it, but it isn't likely to blow up. To unleash the power of ANFO, demolition workers must use a device called a detonator-which contains a small amount of a highly explosive material-and a powerful booster charge that will create enough of a shock wave to set off the compound. A special type of detonator called a blasting cap is most frequently used, and its sale is tightly controlled...
...pitch in and pay for some of these "extras,'' there is an understandable impulse to do so. In the Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, for example, the Parent Volunteer Association of the Joseph Sears primary school raised $92,000 last year to build a new playground. Similarly, a parent booster club at the Kenter Canyon elementary school in tony Brentwood, California (where one parent periodically sends her gardener over to tend the grounds), raised $78,000 to subsidize a computer instructor, a librarian, a music and art teacher and teachers' aides. "If we didn't have money from the parents," says...
Brentwood's Kenter Canyon is a case in point. In contrast to contributing the $78,000 last year to the booster club for additional staff, parents gave only $5,000 to the PTA, which can't subsidize salaries and must turn over 20% of its revenues to a citywide fund for disadvantaged students. "Some parents become very hostile about how hard we work, and then have to turn over a chunk of it downtown," says PTA president Krieger...
...those that want to allow athletic scholarships don't see the longterm problems. They forget about how scholarships give schools incentives to cheat, or give powerful booster clubs reason to form, or create an "athletic underclass" that see school as a four-year purgatory until professional athletics become possible...