Anonymous wrote:My SIL is pretty much the volunteer school assistant. Her kids have been in that school for 8 years. She goes in 1.5 days a week. Initially years ago, she just helped the K teacher (her child was in the class) but over the years pretty much all the teachers want her help.

They either leave her a folder in the office of what needs to be done or book her to come to their classroom for x amount of time.

She mostly does photocopying, putting up bulletin boards, preparing activity centers, organizing class or school events, lots of cutting and prep work. She also helps out in two classes with extra reading support and in one class she grades math worksheets.

The reason this works is that she is extremely reliable and consistent. She minds her own business and just does as she is asked. Her kids are well behaved and well liked. What she does, she does well so that the teachers can trust that they don't have to redo it.

This past year she was going to cut back as she only has one child left at the school and the teachers pleaded with her to keep coming. They rely on her and it saves them time they can use in other ways. A couple of them even asked her if she would come next year even though she won't have any kids at the school!

Not seeing what that has to do with her success as a volunteer. Favortism? Challenging kids = bad parents/volunteers?

Parents in the classroom are a -real- mixed bag. Our former private liked to think of itself as a legacy parent co-op. Parents constantly appeared in classrooms, paid attention to their own kids, behaved with excessive familiarity re their kids friends (and enemies), interrupted the flow of instruction, and were generlly unhelpful. They monopolized time and split the kids' attention. In our public, there are lots of volunteers, but they don't come and go at will, they don't participate in "running" the classroom, their roles are pretty well-defined, and the disruption factor seems to be zero.

My SIL is pretty much the volunteer school assistant. Her kids have been in that school for 8 years. She goes in 1.5 days a week. Initially years ago, she just helped the K teacher (her child was in the class) but over the years pretty much all the teachers want her help.

They either leave her a folder in the office of what needs to be done or book her to come to their classroom for x amount of time.

She mostly does photocopying, putting up bulletin boards, preparing activity centers, organizing class or school events, lots of cutting and prep work. She also helps out in two classes with extra reading support and in one class she grades math worksheets.

The reason this works is that she is extremely reliable and consistent. She minds her own business and just does as she is asked. Her kids are well behaved and well liked. What she does, she does well so that the teachers can trust that they don't have to redo it.

This past year she was going to cut back as she only has one child left at the school and the teachers pleaded with her to keep coming. They rely on her and it saves them time they can use in other ways. A couple of them even asked her if she would come next year even though she won't have any kids at the school!