PTO Today

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting deaths, we at first were stunned and speechless. Then, many in the PTOs community started doing what they so often do—looking for ways to help.

Here are some suggestions for helping the families of Newtown, Conn., as well as your own communities.

1. Contact your school administration to see how you can assist their efforts in working with your school community. PTOs and PTAs are in a special position to help because they know how to organize and reach out to families. The administration may need help in disseminating school safety information and reminders about such procedures as lockdown drills. Find out if the school principal would like you to get this info out on your own channels such as your newsletter, as well as your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

2. Reach out to parents in your community (you may already be hearing from them) to see if there is interest in holding a collection or somehow honoring the children and adults from the Sandy Hook community. Line up to your go-to people who can get things done quickly and see if you can do a holiday collection.

There are several organizations in Newtown, Conn., that are accepting donations to help the victims’ families, including Newtown Youth and Family Services, which can be reached at 203-426-8103. Another group accepting donations is the Newtown Parent Connection, Inc., which you can reach at or 203-270-1600.

Also, this article from the West Hartford News has additional information on how and what to donate.

3. Consider organizing a quick project to express appreciation and thanks to teachers and staff at school. You were likely going to do something like this anyway (or maybe already have). But simple and brief expressions of caring will have such special meaning now.

We have many gift ideas on our File Exchange for teacher appreciation that could make for sweet and simple holiday gifts. Also, this article provides several suggestions about how to show teachers how much they mean to you.

4. Gather resources on helping kids and families cope with tragic news. Many organizations are releasing information on how to talk to kids that would be useful to your families. School Family columnist Livia McCoy, a teacher who works with children with learning disabilities, says children—and adults—will process this tragedy in different ways.

Here are some other resources that offer good suggestions:

• How To Talk to Children About Violence Against Children
• Talking To Kids About Scary Things

5. After the holidays, consider a community service or outreach program to add to your winter and spring calendars. Your community may be feeling helpless right now in the face of such horrible sadness and doing something—taking action to help others—will help your community heal as well. These articles have several ideas for projects:

• Community Service: Paying It Forward With Good Works
• Community Service Projects That Raise Social Awareness

6. Finally, just be available to families as needed. Do you have a meeting before the end of the year? Scrap the usual agenda if it makes sense and just let people talk. Giving parents and kids a sense of connection is perhaps the best thing any of us can do right now.

Update:  Check out our new blogpost with additional resources for helping the Sandy Hook community here . 

Looking for a way to really help your teachers this holiday season? Check out this article about great classroom gifts on our sister site, www.teacherlists.com, by PTO Today Associate Editor Elizabeth S. Leaver. The article includes tons of ideas for useful and educational gifts for the classroom. We have some examples of gift ideas here in this blog, and you can find the full list here.

Also, consider helping teachers set up their own Classroom Holiday Gift List on www.teacherlists.com. It works something like a wedding registry, allowing parents to select and purchase a classroom gift online.

Classroom Gift Ideas:

• Art Supplies: The brightly colored designs in Roylco’s Animals and Creature Paper lend themselves to a world of wildlife-theme possibilities, including origami, murals, masks, and more. (preschool-elementary grades; $10.99) Big stencils mean big fun! The Roylco Mega Stencils with pop-out templates come in a set of eight, making it simple for kids to have hours of fun with paint, chalk, and colored pencils. (preschool-elementary grades; $17.99)
• Social Studies: Children will enjoy learning or enhancing their map skills with Creative Teaching Press Map Skills workbooks, a series that uses age-appropriate maps for practicing skills like using latitude and longitude, locating places on a grid, estimating distances using scale, and more. (grades 2-6; $11.54-$35.68) Just about every classroom could use the House of Doolittle Laminated World Map. At 50 inches x 33 inches, the map has write-on/wipe-off capability and includes national capitals, major cities, rivers, time zones, and major peak elevations. What’s more, the heavy lamination will last for years. (elementary-middle grades; $28.55)
• Science: The Dowling Magnetics Super Science Magnet Kit contains everything students need to explore the science of magnetic forces, including a lodestone, the Earth’s only natural magnet. (grades 3 and up; $23.18) Based on a NASA Space Shuttle experiment to study ants in zero gravity, the Fascinations Toys and Gifts Antworks Space Age Ant Habitat Set contains a nontoxic translucent gel that acts as the tunnel medium for the ants as well as their food and water source—providing hours of good (and clean) fun and instruction. (grades 2-6; $1.83)
• Math: For students learning the fundamentals of money, the Didax Money Sudoku Game contains everything needed to complete 10 challenging Sudoku puzzles, including 32 realistic coins, 10 full-color game boards, and an answer key. (early elementary grades; $11.99) Teaching shapes and sizes is easier (and more fun) with Learning Resources Mini GeoSolids, a set of 32 colorful plastic geometric pieces in four sizes of eight shapes: triangular prism, cube, cone, cylinder, rectangular prism, hexagonal prism, triangular pyramid, and square pyramid. (preK-elementary grades; $14.99)
• English/Language Arts: Teachers can help boost middle graders’ vocabulary and reading comprehension skills with the Didax Cloze Middle Grades Activity Books, which include more than 150 pages in a three-book set, plus a free book of spelling essentials. (elementary-middle grades; $29.35) Give young readers a boost with Didax Rhyming Words Matching Puzzle Cards, a 30-card puzzle set that helps students with word recognition as well as vocabulary development and rhyming. (grades K-3; $13.99)

If your parent group could use a few more good men, it’s worth taking some pointers from Jim Moore. He’s the founder and former chief executive of WATCH D.O.G.S. (Dads of Great Students), the father involvement initiative of the National Center for Fathering. Its mission: to organize fathers and father figures to be positive male role models for students and to enhance school security. The father of three is writing his second book on fatherhood.

What are the benefits of getting dads involved at school?
Dads are winners because they feel like Michael Jordan on the playground, Albert Einstein in the classroom, and Superman in the hallway. And when dads are connected, kids win. The third winner is the school.

What’s a good way for parent groups to start connecting with dads and male role models?
The message should be “Come as you are.” Invite fathers and kids to a pizza night and you’ll be amazed at how many dads show up. There’s a synergy that’s built for years to come.

What can parent groups do to ensure that all dads/men find a role at school?
If all you want Dad to do is landscaping, he can do that at home. We want dads to find their comfort zones….For engineer dads who like math, have them work with flash cards; if some dads love reading, let them read with kids in the gym. We all love to eat school food, or even just high-fiving kids in the cafeteria. Involve the dad and remember he’s not a security guard, he’s not a cop, he’s a dad. His job is to walk the hallway and be a positive light for the kids. The vast majority of dads want to help, they just need specifics.

You might think a fundraising chairman’s job is done once stacks of orders start flowing in. Not quite. It’s important to manage the money throughout the fundraising process.

1. Start by establishing paper trails. Encourage sellers to write the student’s name on each check they collect. This is a big time-saver should there be an issue with any check.

2. Assign someone you trust to collect fundraising envelopes. Try to limit this job to just one or two people so nothing gets lost or misplaced.

3. Make sure there’s a collection system in place. Establish a routine of collecting envelopes each day. Keep collecting envelopes several days after the fundraising deadline to catch late orders.

4. Once all orders have been placed, review each one. This is time-consuming but critical. Make sure a payment is included in each envelope. Endorse the checks as you are organizing them at this point—it will save a little time.

5. Count all the cash. Bundle the bills by denomination, with singles in stacks of 50. Roll the coins. Complete a deposit form to list all the individual denominations and simplify calculating the total. You can download a free deposit form from the “Treasurer’s Forms’’ section of the File Exchange.) Have your trusted assistant recount your deposit to verify your total.

6. Create a separate “oops” list of orders that have a discrepancy. Work from this central list to call or send a notice to each of the parents to get more information about their payment.

7. Get to the bank. Deposit the money immediately or lock it up in the school safe until you can make the deposit. Don’t wait until the money is all in; make several separate deposits rather than one big one.

8. Verify before you pay. When it is time to pay the fundraising company, verify the amount with the fundraising committee chairperson. Record the payment on a check request form, and send in the check.

No, you can’t grow whole pizza pies, but you can use a pizza garden to make lessons in nutrition and sustainability come alive for students. With help from the PTO, students at Woodman Park Elementary in Dover, N.H., planted tomato, basil, garlic, and oregano on a rolling cart that can be moved around the school. The PTO secured donations from several gardening companies and a cheesemaker for the project. Students sampled donated cheese, picked up pizza recipes, and took home information about gardening. The vegetables will be used in school lunches.

Since we noted a trend in novels centered on the school parent group world in the August 2011 issue of PTO Today magazine, several more novels have crossed our desk.

In I Murdered the PTA, by Wendy Dager, a mom is falsely accused of planting a bomb at a PTA meeting, then becomes a target for the real killer.

The main character is widow Daphne Lee-Lee, a quirky sculptor who plays in a punk band. When she takes a bathroom break during a PTA meeting, she survives an explosion that kills the rest of the parents there. The humorous book blends elements of murder mystery and romance as Daphne discovers there’s a lot she didn’t know about the PTA leaders at her daughter’s school.

Although Dager served as a PTA board member for seven years, she says that all the characters in the book are fictional. “No PTA members were harmed during the writing of this book,” she writes.

Pi Day was started by a children’s museum in the 1980s as a way to get kids interested in math. Since then, teachers and parent groups have found ever more creative ways to make math fun and celebrate the famous number (abbreviated as 3.14) each March 14.

Pi(e) Day
Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Many schools observe the day with activities using pies or pizzas. You might recruit teachers who agree to be “pied,” then invite students to vote for one teacher to take a pie in the face by putting coins in a jar. Or you could help teachers with their Pi Day lessons by supplying pizzas for their classes. Teachers can use the round pizzas to demonstrate lessons before students eat them for lunch.

Family Fun
Hold a family night focused on math. Count off attendees from 1 to 9. Then recite the digits of pi, with a person representing each number moving to the appropriate place in order, until you run out of people. Plan math games and invite students to challenge their parents. End the evening with a helping of pie for everyone.

Pi Contest
Challenge students to write poems about pi or to memorize as many digits as they can. Give winners storybooks that involve pi, such as Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi by Cindy Neuschwander, or gift certificates to a local pizza place.

Many service organizations, civic clubs, and fraternal groups have volunteer power they are willing to share. Use these tips to tap into that resource for your school:

Start with a plan. Before you approach an organization, determine a project you need help with, how much time is involved, and the specific work required.

Use your contacts. Ask members of the school community whether they have contacts at local civic groups. Simply talking to a friend or neighbor about how their organization can contribute to the school might start a lasting partnership.

Be patient. It usually takes some time to get a response from a civic organization. Keep the timeline in mind when you plan your outreach.

Stay in touch regularly. Appoint a member of your group to be the liaison with the civic organization. It’s important to keep the lines of communication open.

Say thanks publicly. Send a thank-you note to the club, but also send a press release to local media detailing the help they have given to the school.

Make it a two-way street. Offer to help the civic organization with its own project. Maybe your parent group could provide volunteers to help them, opening up the possibility of an ongoing partnership.

Read more: Service Groups Lend a Hand

Parent groups are using new ways to make fathers feel welcome. Want to get more fathers involved at your school? As these groups show, it helps to make an appeal for volunteers aimed directly at dads.

Dads’ Night at the Movies

The Huntsville (Ala.) Council of PTAs, together with some local churches, sponsored a PTA Dads Night at a movie theater in September, allowing fathers to purchase reduced-price tickets. The selected film, Courageous, follows four police officers and focuses on their roles as fathers. Parents from 17 schools attended, along with the superintendent and school board president.

Specific Requests

A San Antonio PTA found success asking fathers to volunteer at school on their child’s birthday, giving them the chance to enjoy lunch with their child. During meet the teacher night at Canyon Ridge Elementary, one father signed up about 60 other men to volunteer.

While researching programs to get more fathers involved at school, Canyon Ridge PTA president Lisa deBonoPaula learned of another area school that keeps a “honey do” list at the front desk. Dads can tackle tasks like moving heavy furniture, helping the PE teacher during gym class, and hammering nails into walls.

Just for Dads

Other schools have had success with dads-only parent groups or programs such as Watch D.O.G.S. and All Pro Dads, or by forming father’s committees that are a part of the parent group. The Mountainview Elementary PTA in Saugus, Calif., has an active Dads Committee. The group meets monthly and hosts a golf tournament and a rummage sale and helps with other PTA events.

Read more: Dad involvement article archive

These best practices can help your committees run themselves, efficiently and without conflict:

Give committees a job to do. Every committee should have a specific purpose, clear expectations, budget, timeline, and milestones. Don’t establish any committee without a definite idea of what you want it to accomplish.

Focus on the goals, not the process. Once you establish the goals and parameters for the committee, let the committee itself decide how they will do the actual work. Micromanaging is more likely to undermine the work than to move it forward.

Set milestones. Committees should report their progress to the board at regular, predetermined intervals. Use these check-ins to make sure the committee is progressing as you expect and has all the resources needed to effectively execute their work.

Get all members involved. It’s up to the committee chair to divide the milestones into discrete jobs and to make sure everyone is involved in moving the committee toward its goal. Keep in mind that people participate because they want to make a meaningful contribution, not just to do busywork.

Don’t wait until the end to say thanks. Celebrate when milestones are reached along the way, even if you haven’t completed the entire job. Giving people encouragement will help keep them energized even for long projects.

Learn more: PTO and PTA committees topic page