PTO Today

Prince Georges County (MD) making specific efforts to involve Dads. Article includes good research and background on why getting dads involved is so key.

Unusually strong (and long) piece here from Connecticut with excellent content for parents on the hows and whys for parents of getting involved at school. Good stuff.

OK, this PTA creatively calls it the “Kindergarten Cry” but I still love the name “Boo Hoo Breakfast” for an event to welcome/support the new parents at your school, who are letting go of their babies for the first time. Fun way to make that first connection and make a great first impression.

Reminds me — there a whole bunch of good “Boo Hoo Breakfast” docs in our File Exchange. Have you seen the File Exchange yet? It’s my favorite new PTO tool of 2008 (though I am a bit biased).

Gotta love it when a PTO realizes that involvement takes unique outreach… and then sees great success.

This PTO in Southwest Florida is hosting family events and they’re involvement motto is: “Make it Fun and They Will Come”. How great is that? Check out more about their involvement success in this article.

It’s such a fundamental truth of growing involvement — it starts with the family events. Meetings aren’t the key at all. You can have better meetings. You can have raffles for attending meetings. You can have shorter meetings. But they’re still meetings. When you’re trying to connect with those who aren’t connected, you have to attract them. (Hint: meetings are not attractive.)

This has probably been our number one topic on the site and in our talks (which is why I love this Florida story so much). Looking for more aroud this? We’ve got: My column on why meetings don’t matter nearly as much as most PTOs think. And we’ve got great family event ideas.

If you do nothing else this coming year, think this way. (Now, would someone please help me down of my soapbox???)

I just ran across this t-shirt site (and this one shirt, in particular), and I think I’ve found the best door-prize ever for a Kindergarten welcome event. Cool stuff. Thought I’d pass it along.

Interested and heated discussion on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution site. The crux: should heavily-involved parents get (or expect) occasional school benefits in exchange for their volunteering?

Excited to introduce all of our ptotoday.com readers and users to a new site we launched just this morning — schoolfamily.com.

It’s from the same team of involvement experts who bring you ptotoday.com, but you’ll see that the focus is subtly but importantly different. Where ptotoday.com is all about the challenges of being a great school PTO or PTA leader, schoolfamily.com is all about the challenges of being a great school parent. Example: ptotoday.com might talk about how to put on a spaghetti supper for 400, while schoolfamily would talk about why attending a spaghetti supper actually matters.

We’re excited about how this kind of new content can help you (as a leader) accomplish even more. Hope you’ll share the new site with all your parents, as helping parents “get it” when it comes to getting involved is what you’re all about and what schoolfamily.com is all about.

(We’d also love your ideas on how we can make schoolfamily.com even better.) Enjoy!

I don’t know if Ana Markowski has been reading PTO Today and our parent involvement pages, but — man-oh-man — does she ever get this stuff! I just loved reading this comprehensive piece in Minneapolis Star-Trib detailing how Markowski and her PTO have involved more and more parents by getting creative, being fun, and *serving* parents — those are the key ingredients for every group.

This one’s well worth the read for all leaders. Have you (or can you?) been instituting any of these habits at your school?

Here’s a new twist (and I bet it will be the first of many of these). Talented volunteer puts together a video selling the importance of volunteering at school. Professional editing and a soundtrack make it really slick. Love it! I feel like I’m watching Oprah:

We’ve always said that if announcing: “Meeting next Tuesday at 7PM” is your main involvement-building strategy, then you’re in trouble. These guys clearly get that.