Our PTO publishes a school directory every fall. We include contact information sheets in the informational packets distributed at our back-to-school picnic and send them home with children as well. Information is entered manually into this spreadsheet.

There are three different worksheets. The main worksheet has columns for the child's first, middle, last and nicknames, teacher's name and grade level; and parents' contact information, with different spaces for custodial and noncustodial parents.

A second worksheet lists teacher contact information.

A third worksheet covers parents' employment information. We use this to generate a Parent Resource Directory for teachers who may be looking for people with particular expertise to speak to their classes. We also use the parent directory when we solicit donations for our annual Spring Carnival.

We learned recently that federal law allows the district to release general contact information for a school directory, unless the family opts out. We will go that route for 2008-09, but still format the information in this spreadsheet. And we still will have to manually collect the parent employer information.