So this funny thing happened in my town the other day.
Well funny to ME.
One of our esteemed overly highly rated elementary schools from our way inflated amazing school district handed out t-shirts to all of their students with a phone number to a sex line printed on them.
And no I am not kidding.
Apparently, and the details are still cloudy, the t-shirt designer or the PTA came up with the slogan “How’s our running? Call 1-800- Eat-Dust” to add to the bottom of the Jog-a-thon t-shirts. Which I think is terribly cute. Unfortunately, that number already actually belongs to someone.
Someone who runs a transsexual phone sex line.
So the school hands out a t-shirt to every kid in the school and one of those families tries the phone number for fun. Whooooaaa BIG Surprise. The parent calls the school. The parent calls their friends, and eventually the school contacts all the parents and asks for the shirts to be returned asap. Somewhere in all this one of the parents contacts KTLA News. And since neither the school district nor the PTA was in a mood to talk about their blunder-the News contacts the only city focused website they can find; Land of Gracious Living for comment.
Land of Gracious Living operators by coincidence happen to be parents of a child AT THE T-SHIRT SCHOOL.
This was a goldmine for KTLA news who ran over to their home to interview them.
And now the story gets not so funny..
The school in question is blaming the Land of Gracious Living site operators for contacting KTLA . And insinuating they have brought SHAME to the school. And basically the Yorba Linda MOMfia (a different branch than the one I have been chatting about on Twitter for months) is in full force trying to make this family feel like crap about it. Which is the MOMfia’s specialty. Guilt and shame and SHUNNING. It is the mob mentality of pointing the finger at someone to cover for their own mistakes. They seem to be living under the ‘we don’t air our dirty laundry’ motto at this school. Especially when the dirty laundry has phone numbers to a porn line.
So do I think any less of this school because of this t-shirt blunder?
Hell no.
But do I think they are a wreck for trying to point a finger at a family because they talked to the media about a problem THEY DID NOT CREATE?
HELL YES.
*As you all might remember, I had my own problems with my school and this website. (Read it here)
So I am just a little sensitive tuned in to this sort of thing…
Apparently when the school teaches the concepts of free speech and self expression they are just sorta kidding.
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It’s a shame that some people are trying to make the nice folks at that website feel bad for being truthful. I watched the news clip and one comment I have is this. The reporter said “remember that saying from the 60s and 70s ‘don’t tread on me’…” Does he not know that saying is a LOT older than the 20th century??
WOW. Interesting. I heard the news story and the statement from the school( which was only a statement- not an apology ) but didn’t know about the
rest of the story!! Thanks for reminding us how the guilty often point fingers at the innocent to cover their own tracks!
What a cluster. What ever happened to laughing at ourselves? We made a boo-boo — D’OH! And doesn’t the school know that people can smell bull…ony a mile away? Just look at the whole Balloon Boy thing. People smelled a rat right away.
Good for you for sticking up for those parents. The Momfia needs to be ashamed at their own behavior.
I watched this unfold …as parent at this school. I feel this family with their web site was only thinking of themselves and their gain.
They kept a shirt that was asked to be turned in. They posted it on their site. You can see how excited they are that their site is talked about on this blog and that one….who cares!
The kids knew nothing before this story broke…. and with a channel 5 van at the school they are asking lots of questions.
The sad part of the story is that the school did make a mistake but the teachers, principal, and pta tried to cover it up by telling everyone there was a typo, which was a good enough excuse for the kids (mine too). All this exposure about the adult chat line has left alot of kids with questions like “what is an adult chat line.” These kids are 11 and under!!!! I think it really stinks that we have a parents OR parents at our school that did not care enough about protecting our children from this. Im not sure what to say about the family with the website but I can tell you for SURE we have an evil woman on PTA that I am certain had alot to do with this exposure as well, boy wasn’t she happy this week!! I bet you can guess who it is.
Thanks for the ‘rest of the story.’ I saw some of this on the news and KNEW that you would know more.
So glad I’m going back on your blog to make sure I didn’t miss anything during this busy week.
Totally missed this post and now I have to sent it to everyone I know!!
I totally would have kept the shirt. And blogged about it.
Some people take life way too seriously.