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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am a PTA president, about to start my second year as president because we couldn't convince anyone to take the job on. I don't believe in arm-twisting someone into a volunteer role. My motivation is to support my kids' school and because I think I have the organizational skills to stay on top of all the pieces of the job. But it is a no joke job, year-round. And I can't neatly compartmentalize it into the 4 hours I'd like to spend on it per week - there are daytime meetings, emails all the time, night events, weekend events, Board meetings, regular PTA meetings... the list goes on and on.

Our Board has a mix of moms and dads, but moms (many of whom also have full-time paid employment) do the vast, vast majority of uncompensated PTA labor in our school. One of my goals for the upcoming year is to talk more about this inequity and [b]to scale back on some of the labor-intensive activities the PTA does and try to focus on work that our community values the most and that requires less of us[/b].[/quote]

This is laudable. Sometimes these things snowball (per the valid teacher appreciation week complaints) into things that are not valued and are a lot of work. Why!??!  Brilliant to shit the focus to high-value, low labor things. Like providing t-shirts for field day, for example. We should start a thread of these and see if anyone agrees. Teacher appreciation week is def high labor low value. One catered teacher appreciation lunch? Spectacular. [/quote]

This is OP.  I think this makes a lot of sense.  If our PTA indeed doesn't dissolve (and maybe I have to become President for this not to happen, sigh) the first task maybe should be a survey of parents and teachers to identify the most high-value events, and scale everything way back this year, with some time for reflection on how we will move forward in the future.  With all of the working parents and people's challenging lives (I have since spoken to various people who have explained that they have ill relatives, or job uncertainly, or a number of things I was unaware of) the traditional PTA of my 1980s childhood probably just isn't realistic (at least not for our school). Thanks everyone for your ideas and encouragement. And to answer the question about PTA reputation, I have been at the school for 3 years and have never heard complaints about the PTA being exclusive or snobby or whatever, so I don't think that's a big part of it.
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