May 19 2008
That’s some quality parenting right there
The Morning Call has a nice little article today about a particularly precious snowflake (h/t Fark):
Rebecca Maykish is 17 and dreads school so much that she stopped going regularly.
In fourth grade.
Those days off have come at a price to her school district and the Palmerton taxpayers who support it. Since 2004, the Palmerton Area School Board has authorized payments of more than $45,000 to help Rebecca make up for her missed school days. Rebecca’s mother, Barbara, has used the money for at-home tutoring and education software purchases. She has also spent it on modeling classes for Rebecca, subscriptions to teen magazines, and travel to New York and Toronto with a summer camp.
All of the expenses were approved by the district.
That’s right - for close to nine years, Mother-of-the-Year Barbara (hereby designated “MoY Babs” from here on out) decided that, when her daughter started freaking out about school after a couple of weeks, that it was definitely time to not only get her out of there, but start collecting tens of thousands of dollars in tax money under the auspices of some make-believe phobia.
It gets better, though.
When the final bills were tallied, the fund set up for Rebecca had reached $46,361. All the money paid to her came from district funds, said Steve Serfass, Palmerton Area School District solicitor.
Barbara Maykish spent $3,892 on at-home instruction, and hundreds more on educational software. She spent $2,100 for Rebecca to take classes at the Barbizon modeling academy, and nearly $6,000 to attend summer camp in Ferndale, N.Y., and go on field trips to Toronto and New York. The fund also covered $54 for subscriptions to Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Teen People magazines, according to documents provided by Maykish and the school district.
The documents show Barbara Maykish spent $222 to board her dogs while visiting Rebecca at a California boarding school in 2007; $2,329 for her and Rebecca to fly to the school and $500 for tuition and spending from March-May.
That’s right - a modeling academy, along with subscriptions to teen magazines. Let’s take a look at America’s Next Top Model…
I’m thinking no. Also, while we’re on the subject, what airline did they use to fly to this school? Virgin Air Superfly Pimp Class or something?
The real crux of the problem, though, is right here…
At the beginning of most school years, Rebecca has tried to attend school but the longest she has made it was to Thanksgiving in fourth grade. She began this year as a junior at Palmerton High School but stopped going after the third week of September.
”It’s kind of humiliating to start out at the beginning of the year,” Rebecca said. ”People always say ‘Didn’t you used to go to this school? What happened?’ ”
Rebecca says she reads for pleasure, enjoying parodies such as ”Zen of the Zombie,” a mock self-improvement book. But her writing skills are weak and she can only do basic multiplication and division on downloaded worksheets. She estimates she spends three hours a day learning. Barbara Maykish has opted not to homeschool her, saying she worried that she would not be able to help Rebecca with her math and writing problems.
That’s right - the mother elected not to homeschool her because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep up with the academic demands of a fourth grader.
Look, I understand phobias, at least to a point. I have a mild phobia of spiders. It used to be a lot worse, but, as I got older, I realized that I had a choice - I could either let my phobia of spiders turn me into a sniveling wimp whenever I saw one in a room, or I could get over it, channel that fear into pure, undying hatred, and crush the bastards. In short, I realized that it didn’t matter whether I had a phobia or not - the spiders didn’t care. They weren’t going to stop existing just because I had some hangups regarding them. At some point, MoY Babs failed to teach her daughter this, letting her develop all kinds of wonderful separation anxieties (NOTE: Why do I have the feeling she was one of those “mothers” that insisted on holding her daughter whenever she cried?) so that her daughter is essentially doomed to a life of useless ignorance.
Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.
Ran across your blog while reading about this travesty on the net. You are so right! This woman(notice, I didn’t say mother) perpetuated this mess by enabling her daughter to avoid going to school.
I’m not saying this by heresay. I know this firsthand as I teach in Palmerton but not in the public school itself. One of my colleagues actually tutored this little cherub. We still can’t figure out if she was the wonderful one or the not so wonderful one.
Anyway, if she has a phobia for school, I would assume she would struggle to be around strangers, right? Hmmm, I clearly remember seeing her working out at a local gym while in the presence of many strangers. I’m sure the district paid for the gym membership….
This is what our society has become. So sad.
I fear work…. someone support me to stay home!!!
As usual, the school system fails and the Pusification of America overcomes. I’m sure that money that was wasted on that piece of trash wouldn’t have benifited hundreds of other students in that school district. 50 grand could have bought some new textbooks or even a computer lab. Instead lets give the money to some crouchfruit that doesn’t want to go to school and thinks she’ll become a model (maybe for trashy illiterate hoes dot com).
Let’s fix this:
1. Mother and daughter forced to start attending school at the fourth grade.
2. Daughter gets part-time job to start repaying school district and to learn something useful in life.
3. Everyone in the school district who was involved in making the decision to give these people $$$, fired and also forced to repeat 4-12th grades.
Has this so called mother given therapy to her daughter? Is her daughter on Meds to help with her phobias? Is it isolated to school? Obviously not, since she was spotted at a local gym working out amongs strangers. Its so wrong.
I live and work in Palmerton, I pay my property taxes to the school district, just like all the other taxpayers. Every year the school district demands tax increases to support our kids education, yet continue to cut school programs. It’s because of this kind of wasteful, uncontrolled spending by the school district.
This girl isn’t doing anything different than what the district has been doing for years…. treating the taxpayers as their cash-cows.
This kind of thing is fraud & the mother should be thrown in jail. The americans with disabilities act doesn’t even recognise this “phobia”. The taxpayers here out to go to the next school board meeting & demand that they stand accountable. I have my own kids to support, without having my hard earned tax dollars get sent to some spoiled mother & daughter who refuse to work/ go to school.