This time, Mayor Mike — and, now, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein — have gone too far: They’re actually banning bake sales in schools.
That’s right: bake sales.
Next thing you know they’ll be swiping candy from babies — literally.
Bake sales are as American as apple pie — uh, better make that carrot sticks. But the Department of Education apparatchiks nonetheless have put out new rules curtailing these harmless, all-American, community-spirit fund-raisers.
Why? To combat obesity, of course.
Never mind that raising money for a club or sports team gives students vital lessons in civic participation and even, to some extent, business operations.
Or that it provides badly needed cash for special student events or purchases.
Never mind that sales by parent associations give moms and dads a chance to actually visit school buildings — with classes in session — and take an active role in their kids’ educations.
Never mind all that.
A brownie might make you fat.
Under the new rules, student-run bake sales are completely banned during school hours, though they’ll be allowed at after-school events. Parent-association sales, already limited to once a month, will be kept to after-lunch periods.
An assistant principal at La Guardia High School on the Upper West Side told The New York Times last week that all food-based fund-raising plans had been suspended.
No, there’s nothing wrong, as such, with encouraging healthy eating at school. But Klein & Co. have picked an awfully clumsy way to reach that goal.
Indeed, the schools that rely most on bake sales — those in solidly middle-class neighborhoods that boast heavy parental involvement — are the ones with the smallest student-obesity problem.
Why target them?
Actually, this whole plan is out of character for Klein: His reforms, after all, have been about empowering local principals to deal with local problems. So why are he and his Central Command pencil-pushers stipulating system-wide rules that get so deep into the realm of micromanagement?
Again, bake sales are politically healthy exercises in “community organizing.” Or does the city’s education brass see them as a threat?