PTO Today

I'm interested in finding out more about room parents, i.e., a specific selected volunteer for each room who is responsible for coordinating other room volunteers.

How did your school establish this?
How did you select the volunteer?
What duties did you assign to the room parent?
How well (or not) has this worked?
What sort of training do you think they would need to have?

Thanks in advance for your inspirations!

What I do is send home a PTO folder, among other things, it has a volunteer form for parents to fill out. It tells parents exactly what we need volunteers for throughout the school year and ask what they would be willing to do. One of the questions is about interest in being a room volunteer coordinator and another is about being a room parent. The room coordinator is responsible for contacting the room parents when something is needed. In the past this has mostly been about holiday parties. Our goal is to expand on that this year and have the room coordinator make the calls for their classroom when things are needed for bake sales, silent auction, etc... We also have a school room coordinator, who calls the room coordinators to let them know its time to make calls about something. All of this is taken care of with the volunteer form in the folder. We are specific on the volunteer form and list each catagory: bake sales, silent auction, handing out fund-raiser orders, etc... Another goal for this year is to have the room coordinators line up different volunteer parents to maybe send something for each teacher once a month to show appreciation-it might only be an apple, but as long as the thought is there I think it will be appreciated. Good Luck! Debbie