Is your PTA/PTO friendly and welcoming?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ours is! If you show up and volunteer, you will quickly make connections and friends. Am I going to wine on a Friday with 15 of these moms (lol)? No. But our kids play, we are friendly, if I am in a jam and can’t get to activity pick up, they will grab my kids. They look out for my SN kiddo.

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]

Anonymous wrote: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.

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]

Anonymous wrote:Ours is! If you show up and volunteer, you will quickly make connections and friends. Am I going to wine on a Friday with 15 of these moms (lol)? No. But our kids play, we are friendly, if I am in a jam and can’t get to activity pick up, they will grab my kids. They look out for my SN kiddo.

Ha! I appreciated this response

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have been at two elementary schools in the past few years. The first one had a wonderful, inclusive, and very transparent PTA. They appreciated help and I was always happy to volunteer because everyone was so nice. The second one has a PTO that is the polar opposite. They don't have public meetings, they don't have a newsletter, and they don't seem to want or appreciate help (I was micro-managed and treated like I was this person's employee, not a volunteer who was donating her time to help her child's school), so I'm never volunteering again!

+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.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ours is! If you show up and volunteer, you will quickly make connections and friends. Am I going to wine on a Friday with 15 of these moms (lol)? No. But our kids play, we are friendly, if I am in a jam and can’t get to activity pick up, they will grab my kids. They look out for my SN kiddo.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

So let them figure it out. Or let it crash and burn. If the parents whose kids attend the school don't care about the PTA, maybe it's not necessary. I am leaving a position at the end of this year that I've held for 8 years. They have no replacement for me and its the biggest source of revenue for the PTA. I am happy to train the next person to take over but they have no one. Oh well. Not my problem.

[Anonymous]

Our PTO is cliquey and unwelcoming. The women come across as snobs who don’t have enough to do. Almost every one who is heavily involved is a SAHM. They are mostly helicopter parents whose kids likely have or will have anxiety.

I don’t agree with women working for $0 so I do not volunteer. I paid $20k in property taxes last year though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

Don't be a martyr PP. Just quit, let them figure it out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

So let them figure it out. Or let it crash and burn. If the parents whose kids attend the school don't care about the PTA, maybe it's not necessary. I am leaving a position at the end of this year that I've held for 8 years. They have no replacement for me and it's the biggest source of revenue for the PTA. I am happy to train the next person to take over but they have no one. Oh well. Not my problem.

I came to this point this year. Eventually someone took over but they aren't doing much of anything but not my problem anymore.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our PTO is cliquey and unwelcoming. The women come across as snobs who don’t have enough to do. Almost every one who is heavily involved is a SAHM. They are mostly helicopter parents whose kids likely have or will have anxiety.

I don’t agree with women working for $0 so I do not volunteer. I paid $20k in property taxes last year though.

Wow, you sound obnoxious. You don't believe in volunteering and helping out the school educating and caring for your kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our PTO is cliquey and unwelcoming. The women come across as snobs who don’t have enough to do. Almost every one who is heavily involved is a SAHM. They are mostly helicopter parents whose kids likely have or will have anxiety.

I don’t agree with women working for $0 so I do not volunteer. I paid $20k in property taxes last year though.

Wow, you sound obnoxious. You don't believe in volunteering and helping out the school educating and caring for your kids?

It’s not that I don’t believe in helping out. It’s that I’m suspicious of why only women are doing this. I’m very aware of how much men take advantage of unpaid labor. I’d prefer my county to increase taxes to use to pay women to perform labor for the school.

I wouldn’t work for free for my company and I’m not working for free for the local middle school.

[Anonymous]

Mine is horrid, I will never volunteer through the pta.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our PTO is cliquey and unwelcoming. The women come across as snobs who don’t have enough to do. Almost every one who is heavily involved is a SAHM. They are mostly helicopter parents whose kids likely have or will have anxiety.

I don’t agree with women working for $0 so I do not volunteer. I paid $20k in property taxes last year though.

Wow, you sound obnoxious. You don't believe in volunteering and helping out the school educating and caring for your kids?

It’s not that I don’t believe in helping out. It’s that I’m suspicious of why only women are doing this. I’m very aware of how much men take advantage of unpaid labor. I’d prefer my county to increase taxes to use to pay women to perform labor for the school.

I wouldn’t work for free for my company and I’m not working for free for the local middle school.

At our school the few SAHDs are very involved in the PTA, as well as the occasional dad with a very flexible job. But there are just more SAHMs then SAHDs. It has to do with availability, let's be honest. It's not a big gender-based conspiracy.

[Anonymous]

Ours is not. I attended a meeting and was the only non-position holding person, and no one talked to me!

Also, it's frustrating when they ask for volunteers but then there are way too many people for the amount of work needed.

[Anonymous]

I think they try to be, but it’s definitely a “clique” that holds all the officer positions and the one meeting I went to, there were only 2 of us there who weren’t on the board. It felt like I was intruding on their private time honestly. I don’t know. But then I know they have a hard time getting enough parent volunteers for events - they rely a lot on MS/HS kids who need volunteer hours and local Scouts/Girl Scouts troops. But all the fundraisers have been very successful so it seems like people would rather donate money/goods than time volunteering! This is not in a pricey area of NoVa BTW, our school is overall middle class.