Is your PTA/PTO friendly and welcoming?
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Anonymous
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Our middle school PTA is warm and welcoming but we still can't find volunteers. It's incredibly frustrating. People want a good pta but they don't want to volunteer and they don't want to pay for it. And ours is a super wealthy neighborhood too. I wish people would realize how much they are saving using the public school and throw some money or time our way.
I'm still stuck in my PTA office and my kid has moved on to high school. I'm not kidding. I can't find anyone to replace me and without my position, the pta ceases to function. It's bad. |
Anonymous
I was on the PTA board at my kids’ elementary for years and volunteered a ton of hours but had no interest beyond that. Most teens don’t really want their parents hanging around at school… |
Anonymous
| Absolutely not. |
Anonymous
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Yes, our PTA is welcoming and friendly and I have mostly liked the board throughout the years. Occasionally there's been a person or two who is a little tough to get to know or prickly, but they are balanced out by everyone else.
I'm not super close with any of them, either, so it's not that I'm in some sort of in-crowd. |
Anonymous
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I'm on the board of our PTO and I hope we are perceived as friendly & open! While we have a decent core group of volunteers, there is always so much to do and we need volunteers badly! If you are a do-er, you are welcomed with open arms and we try very hard not to micromanage.
I will say that we sometimes get people with a lot of complaints and/or a lot of ideas, but who are then unwilling to actually volunteer to implement any of those ideas or who get mad when we tell them some idea is impossible. (Like actually against school rules or whatever impossible.) I'm sure some of those people end up thinking we're not friendly & open because we don't run with their ideas when they're not willing to actually help. It's kind of annoying. |
Anonymous
Same here, except Arlington. |
Anonymous
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Our PFA is completely non-cliquey (high school) and we are still struggling for volunteers. It’s just how it goes.
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Anonymous
| OP it seems where you think would not be friendly, warm and helpful are the exact places that are not. |
Anonymous
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I think our PTA used to be ultra-cliquey but realized that this was actively working against their goals of recruiting more parents to come volunteer and get involved. To some degree I think it was an accident of Covid -- when our school came back from Covid, there was this small group of families who had kind of held things together through that time, and they were close to each other and had not had opportunities to forge friendships with other families, plus out of practice generally. So the first couple years after Covid were really bad in terms of them just not welcoming other parents at all, compounded by no in person meetings for a while.
We started at the school and I got frustrated with feeling like my volunteer offers were not welcomed or needed, so I stopped trying. But I have noticed in the last 6 months or so that the PTA seems to be making more of an effort. It is coinciding with the end of terms for the current officers and I think they realized that unless they all want to have to re-up in those roles, they need to start expanding their circle to include others. |
Anonymous
| I think people have different ideas of community. Our PTA is quite large, there's multiple cliques and I think people will find a group they get along with to do whatever school activity. However someone was telling me the PTA is unfriendly because she wants to find mom friends to socialize with after school hours (wine, dinner, etc). There's certainly moms who do that, but most of us just are there to volunteer and go home and if that is your metric for friendly, we would fail. |
Anonymous
lol!! Yes exactly. Same for our school. Not cliquey, amazing PTA, our main problem is how desperately we need more parents to get involved. 30 parents do ALL of the work when there are a pool of 400 parents who could help if they could only be bothered!!!! MCPS north Potomac area. |
Anonymous
Yes, that dynamic is common and agree it's frustrating. As a PTA volunteer who goes to meetings and will volunteer for events, but doesn't want to actually hold an office or be in charge of anything, the best things PTAs can do to attract parents like me are: -- Communicate volunteer opportunities well in advance. For me and a lot of parents, volunteering at an event, even in the evening or on a weekend, will require some scheduling with my spouse or sometimes with work or other commitments. It's very hard when all the calls for volunteers come a day or two before an event -- often I simply can't make that work. -- Give people concrete jobs. Our PTA has a bad habit of calling for volunteers, then a bunch of people show up, and then it turns out that we have more volunteers than we need, or everyone wants to help unload stuff but no one is willing to run concessions. The events that have gone better are ones where people sign up for specific tasks. -- Thank people. It doesn't have to be a big thing, but sometimes volunteering is hard and exhausting, and I have found I feel a lot better about it when I get an email after the event just saying "Hey, thank you to all of you who donated time today." I have had some experiences where I spent 4-6 hours on a hot day cleaning, carrying items, dealing with constant questions, being "on", and no one said a word afterwards about that. It can be demoralizing because that is time I could have spent with my own kids or resting or cleaning my own house or decompressing after a long week at work. It is nice to feel that it was actually appreciated. |
Anonymous
Ha! I appreciated this response |
Anonymous
+1 Our FCPS PTA was full of friendly welcoming parents who were happy to have volunteers for a variety of committees and activities but were not controlling. Not a clique. We moved to a new school last year with a PTO that spends a lot of time defending that they are not a clique. They are. I tried to sign up to volunteer but they "put me on a list" and never followed up. I reached out once more to see if my name was lost and it wasn't. Then they beg for volunteers publicly so they can look like martyrs who are doing everything for the school. Only the board members are considered PTO at this school and everyone else is just a parent and they like to remind everyone of this distinction. 
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Anonymous
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