PTO Today

I'd be interested in a form that could load into a spreadsheet to compile the data for a directory also. It would take some doing to accomodate/capture various parental situations:

* One single parents
* Two single parents in same residence
* Two single parents in different residences
* One single and one married couple, different residences
* Two married couples, different residences

Then, allowing fields to input each parental residence and fields that would capture various last name combinations. Divorced parents usually don't want to be listed as though they are married and living in the same residence. And, if they've remarried, they want their spouses to be included as a parent for that child. It can get hairy.

Jewel - wow, I know exactly what you mean. Our community is very diverse, so we have lots of cultures plus all the versions of families (divorced, different names, two same-sex parents, special characters, complex names, step parents).

I want to be respectful of everyone's preferences, but it gets REALLY hard to figure out a way to record all the combinations. We especially see this on our swim team where we truly deal with every parent as well as child.

The divorced/blended families are often the most difficult because some are still battling each other and there's already lots of tension.

For swim team, we use a database all the local teams use, so do have to limit ourselves to what it will collect. That's actually been a blessing. We did change the labels from "Mother" and "Father" to "Adult 1" and "Adult 2". But we pretty much require two (and only two) adult names.

For directory, I think there's a point where you say - "This is the format. Here are the fields. This is all the space we have."

It does depend on the style you are using. Last one I did was sort of a grid/table with one line per child. So there was no room for extra info. The one from middle school was more of block address merged into 3 or 4 columns. So one person's info might be 5 lines, another could be 4 or 6.

Hi, try www.formspring.com. They let you specify conditional fields based on answers to previous questions. That may help with the many cases you're trying to address. It then dumps allthw collected data into a spreadsheet. Good luck.