School’s P.T.A. Can Really Use Parents’ Help
They may look like they’ve got it all together. Running a school book fair while toting a toddler on their hip, chatting with first grade teachers like they’re best friends, standing behind the school office counter opening mail looking as comfortable as if they were in their own kitchen. In reality, these women are scattered in five different directions. Rarely do they volunteer for just P.T.A. Usually, they are scout leaders, religious education teachers, and volunteers at the local hospital. They spend afternoons at home serving frozen pizza to the kids, running them to soccer practice, and then laying awake all night worrying about whose going to complain about the spring fund-raiser more – parents, teachers, or the principal.
I should know – I was on the board of two elementary school parent associations for about eight years. I went from being a naÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½ve, young parent of a kindergartener who sat in the back alone at her first PTA meeting, to running the whole show at one of the schools eight years later. I’ve run fund-raisers, craft fairs, fall festivals, kindergarten registrations, and newcomers’ picnics. My husband and I have put together countless numbers of newsletters, yearbooks, and flyers.
On a good day, it can be wonderful. Good, dear friends are made while waiting for that big job to come out of the copy machine. On a bad day, it can be violent. I was once given the task of picking up two hundred bagels for a fall festival at a bagel place located in the small of our two local malls. Since this mall had been virtually put out of business by the bigger, newer mall next door, its lack of traffic and large puddle ridden parking lot had lead it to be a hangout for seagulls – although we are no where near a beach. After exiting the mall, I trudged with two shopping carts loaded with green trash bags full of fresh bagels back to my car. I don’t know if I saw them first, heard them, or just felt them circling above me, waiting to get their beaks on the bagels.
I never moved so fast with a shopping cart as I did that day, flinging open the trunk of my car and tossing the bags in as the birds swooped down to grab at them. Two years later, I can’t get out of my car in that parking lot without first searching the sky.
Why don’t more people volunteer to help these poor, downtrodden volunteers? They clearly want the programs P.T.A. provides the school. If the P.T.A. doesn’t do something right, or if they don’t do something at all, non-volunteer parents are the first to complain. Teachers who gave little or no support, ask why better, bigger programming isn’t provided for the students. Principals who give out praise like it’s a gallon of gas at the Exxon station on the corner, will ask for money for bookcases, walkie-talkies, and summer camp programs. Too many people are busy, working hard, driving their kids to sports, coaching teams, or chatting online to attend a meeting. Or they think that the group is too cliquey to let someone new in. Of course, the group is cliquey; they’ve been alone for countless hours working on numerous projects for other people’s children. Many people go to one meeting or offer to volunteer at one event. When no one talks to them or calls them back, they assume they are not wanted, or needed, and abandon the idea of volunteering. It takes more than one attempt. When I was a new parent, I showed up at meeting after meeting, and offered to volunteer for events over and over. If I wasn’t called back, I showed up anyway and offered to help. I smiled. I made some jokes. By the end of the year, I was on my way to a successful career as a PTA volunteer. I could call the principal by his first name. I was able, in roundabout way, to choose the teachers I wanted my children to have for the next eight years. My kids were happy to see me in the halls every once in a while and I believe they did better in school then they would have done had I not been involved.
For a stay-at-home mom with no paid employment for eleven years, my resume is filled overflowing with my various PTA positions, recording secretary, newsletter editor, yearbook chairperson, and vice president. I had no problem at all finding an excellent job when I was ready to go back to work. Of course, it is difficult to fit that job around my scout troop and my C.C.D. class, and now my son is attending ninth grade at a new school and they’re looking for volunteersâÂ?¦
