The Private School Club

[Anonymous]

PP, you can't extrapolate from your experience as a school volunteer to generalizing about all schools. Schools are different, and at some schools the volunteering is less open than at others. At my DC's school, the top volunteer positions are controlled by a tight-knit group of mothers. If you are a new parent, you will not break into the most desirable positions that easily. It is indeed like a private club.

[Anonymous]

sorry..you're right. Mensch-- Yiddish origin basically a nice guy. sorry about that.

[Anonymous]

Well, I'm sure schools do vary by culture, but, I think you usually have to pay your dues in any organization, so to that extent, I'm not sure it is easy to "break into" a leadership position very easily. More fundamentally, though, I guess it doesn't matter to me whether a position is "desirable: to others -- if it's something I'm interested in and/or my kids are interested in, I offer to help out. In doing so, get to know other parents, teachers and administrators who share those interests. It helps, I guess, that I'm not really interested in social climbing and don't buy into thinking that connections and backslapping control my children's fate.

[Anonymous]

jhuber wrote:It is an ongoing (and interesting) challenge we face in schools to manage and balance parent roles in order to be inclusive, when schedules and roles can make it difficult. For example, something as straightforward as a Parent Coffee held at 8:30 am can unintentionally exclude those without flexibility in their schedules to take part. Parents who are free at this hour, or free to volunteer during the school day hours, become more ingrained into the rhythms of school, and by this process develop into a "group" that from the outside seems difficult to enter.

I hate this crap. My daughter's school has already scheduled a coffee at 8:30 am on opening day.

Guess where I'll be?

[Anonymous]

Not to take this off topic, but I'm sure that the schools offer a variety of activities that occur at different times (bagels in the morning, auctions at night, weekend games, etc.). Some are convenient for working parents, some are convenient for non-working parents. There will always be events that parents will not be able to attend. Having a job means that you have to pick and choose which ones you are able to attend and it can be hard, but I don't think that the school can really accommodate every permutation of situation. There are scheduling challenges that all families face regardless of working/not working/single parents/traveling partners, etc.

Having the bagels at 8:30, if you arrive promptly means that you could stay for 1/2 hour and conceivably get to work by 9:30. If you want to prioritize that particular event then most jobs could probably accommodate arriving to work at that time once in a while.

[Anonymous]

There is a culture that the school itself cultivates (such as how meetings are schedules, what school events look like, etc.) and there is the "unofficial" culture that is created by the community itself. Obviously, these two inform each other, but they are not always directly linked.

As we've seen on other posts, such as the one where one parent said parents who receive FA have no right to complain about any aspect of the school, some people deliberately do cultivate and inside/outside culture, where some people are in and some are not.

Let's face it, this is the reality. The parent culture is no different than the kid culture. Does that make it right? Hardly. But it does exist. And how schools respond is integral. But, unfortunately, there is often little that can be done if a catty/domineering group of parents work themselves into the power positions and dictate culture to the community at large.