Reply to Some thoughts about PTAs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a teacher, the things I want help from the pta (or any parents) with aren’t fun or glamorous. I want someone to do lunch duty/hall duty/bathroom duty (even once a week!) so we get our planning time back. I want someone monitoring the kiss and ride line so no one pulls U-turns in the middle of the block creating dangerous situations for kids. I want someone to help act as a crossing guard so our staff doesn’t rotate through to keep kids safe. I want someone else monitoring drop off in the morning so I can talk to the counselors before school starts instead of them opening car doors for kids.

I know it’s not class parties or spirit nights. It isn’t organizing author visits or assemblies. Those things aren’t important though—the day to day sludge is.[/quote]

I totally get this, but I think one reason PTAs have shifted away from this kind of volunteering is that fewer parents have availability to volunteer during the school day than used to be the case. When I was a kid many families had a SAHM who could do stuff like recess or hallway duty and so you could fill out entire schedules with these parents and it served a real purpose. These days most families are dual income and it can be really hard for a parent to commit to a 1 hour volunteer shift in the middle of the week, much less to do this 1-2x a month and for enough other parents to also do this to where teachers can be relieved of recess duty or other things that I know do take away from your planning time. Instead what would happen is the 10 parents who have that kind of freedom would basically have to work at the school for free to provide coverage.

I also think schools are warier about parents performing roles with a lot of child interaction now, due to safety concerns. Our school no longer permits parents to help in classrooms, for instance, whereas 20 years ago it wasn't that uncommon especially in younger grades where an extra set of hands could be helpful. Same concerns about recess or hall duty because schools have a lot of liability issues around things like how adults interact with students. Unless you put parents through the same sort of training teachers and admin go through to deal with this stuff, the school could expose itself to potential problems if, for instance, a parent hugged or discipline a student in an inappropriate way.

I agree PTAs often push parents to spend a lot of time and energy on make work BS that no one really wants and then when the classroom needs something actually useful (like chaperones for a field trip or classroom material donations), parents are burned out and don't contribute. PTAs should be a lot more self-aware about this.[/quote]

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