Nope, happily married, and still not taking time away from my family in the evenings for volunteering. That’s what school hours are for. |
They always hold our at 9am on Thursdays monthly. I can’t attend because I go into work. This means I was never able to attend PTA meetings for a decade. |
So what you're saying is that stay home moms basically hold the PTA hostage by refusing to do anything in the evening? Why can't you spend an hour away from your husband and children? What is with the mommy martyrdom? You know that they can handle being away from you, right? Do you never go out with friends? Like if your kids are home, you MUST be with them at all times? How sad. |
This thread has been eye opening. I had no idea the reason meetings are held during the daytime is because people who don't do anything all day long don't want to give up their "precious" evening family time. |
Can you get them to switch back to PTA? That's ridiculous. |
That is outrageous. I'd organize parents to switch this to PTA. |
Seriously, you can't take one hour a month to attend a PTA meeting in the evening? You do realize that lots of PTA volunteers do so during the school day, without the actual monthly organizational meeting happening when working parents have to work? You can volunteer all you want during the day but still have an inclusive PTA that meets at night monthly. |
You may consider it “doing nothing,” but PTO meetings are used to recruit volunteers for PTO events. These events are largely organized by and carried out by SAHMs. If working moms want to take time off to do it, great, but until then, meetings and events will occur at the time convenient for those who are volunteering. |
You misunderstand. Doing nothing refers to the fact that you don't have daytime obligations. A working parent has to take off literally half the day in order to attend a 10:00am meeting. If you want working parents to volunteer, you can't say "well come to our meetings, then you can volunteer, too!" but then have the meetings at an inconvenient time for them while also saying "the meetings and events will occur at a time convenient for those who are volunteering". What a hypocrite!!! The ES my children went to had 7:00pm PTA meetings, and even the principal made sure that community meetings were after hours. Most of the PTA board members were working parents. I volunteered a lot - most of our committee meetings were over zoom after our kids went to bed and we held a ton of evening events and fundraisers. I was on the committee for our fall and spring fundraisers and was even a room parent one year. The PTA made it easy for ALL parents to volunteer which was great because it was a nice mix of the community (even dads, more than one), it was a really great experience. Again, you're holding the PTA hostage. Don't complain when you don't get volunteers because you are actively making it hard for people to volunteer. I feel really bad for families at schools like yours. |
The biggest difference IMO (as a parent with kids who have a large age gap and attended two different elementary schools) is that PTAs are required to share out information while PTOs can make up their own rules. As working parents, we much preferred the PTA to the PTO b/c we knew where our money was going and there were monthly meetings. The PTA also had access to resources from the National PTA, so they had parent-focused events with speakers on mental health, special education, etc.. The PTO school had one "open" meeting a year that was pretty useless and from what I could tell, they spent their money on assemblies and monthly teacher-focused events (like "this month we're doing a candy bar, next month, we're doing an ice cream bar, etc...). They had one family-oriented after school event to prove that they valued diversity (of course the one event was international night at a school that had a small minority population and of course dumped all the work on them). |