All in all, Philly's schools have done well by my family. So I tend not to think much about schools on the tonier side of the city line.
Until something like Webcamgate comes along. And the imbalance of wealth between the city and the suburbs gets me verklempt all over again.
By now, you surely know about the brouhaha that's set teeth a-gnashing in Lower Merion. A couple in the upper-crust school district has alleged that an administrator spied on their son via a webcam in the school-issued laptop computer that the teen was using at home.
When I heard the news, my first reaction should've been, "What an appalling allegation! If it's true, that administrator oughta hang by a wedgie from the gym rafters!"
Instead, I muttered, "Ya little snot. The district gave you a damn computer? Quit whining."
I'm not proud of this reaction. But I was thinking of my daughter's friend, a super-bright kid who often does computer research at our dining-room table because the teen's family doesn't have a computer.
How much easier would life be with a personal laptop in every home?
So, yeah, my empathy for my kid's computerless friend displaced what should've been my horror that a Lower Merion student's privacy may have been electronically invaded.
I had a similarly petty woe-is-us reaction a few years back, when some students at a Bucks County elementary school came down with mysterious rashes and headaches that had their poor parents worried silly.
When it was finally determined that a fluid used to clean the school's carpeting probably caused the children's afflictions, I didn't say, "Thank goodness their nightmare is over!"
I said, "Wow, they have carpeting?"
I remembered how tickled we parents were, when my daughter was in kindergarten, that another parent donated a big, beaten-up but still cozy Oriental-style rug to the classroom, so our kids wouldn't be sitting on the cold tile for "circle time."
