PTO Today

Always love it when a PTO project gets completed successfully.   In this case — thanks to the PTO — this school backyard no longer looks directly into an active cemetary.

Love it even more when a Lowe’s Toolbox for Education grant is a big part of the reason why the project worked.. 

Nice.

Sounds like these folks are making strong involvement progress bringing lessons from statewide training program back to their school.

Love this quote:

“There are four levels of community and school relationships,” Tyree said.

“There are closed doors where no one is welcome, doors open but no one is invited, only invited if asked, and then the partnership school, which is what we want to be.”

That’s dead-on perfect.  Good luck!

Family events — excellent.  Family events with an academic connection — even better.  So kudos to this Massachusetts PTO for their creative math night for parents and kids with an emphasis on supporting the school math curriculum.

Looking for family night ideas (and the tools and step-by-steps for making them work)?   You’ve got to check out our School Family Nights program.

Was fun this morning to appear with Gene Lavanchy on Fox 25 in Boston to talk about Internet Safety for families.  You can watch the appearance below:

We have a whole ton of good content for your parents over on the Internet Safety Week pages on schoolfamily.com.  As part of this important week, I hope you’ll share these links or any/all of these tips with the families at your school.

Love it when districts “get it” when it comes to honoring and valuing volunteer efforts in schools.  Here’s a recent parent-focused release from the Anoka-Hennepin district in Minnesota that captures that well.

Two more cool things about the release: 

1. All that data on volunteer hours was captured because the district uses our PTO Manager “Volunteer Builder” software to help encourage volunteering and to track volunteer efforts.  Neat to see such nice end results.

2. We’re goig to be in Anoka-Hennepin Tuesday for our PTO Expo.  I’ll be presenting a “best habits of successful PTOs and PTAs” keynote in the morning.  If you’re in the area, i hope you’ll come by.

Unless you spent this week under a very heavy (and sound-proof) rock, then you’ve heard about Earth Day, and of course the health of our environment has been a big topic for years now.  That’s why we’re so excited about our newest School Family Night — Go Green Night — in partnership with the Energy Star program and the EPA. Very cool.

The kits for the NIght will be ready in the fall, but you can already learn more and sign up to host a Go Green Night at your school.  Learn more about Go Green Night here.

We kicked off the partnership this past Saturday on the National Mall in Washinton, D.C., where we were proud to work with new EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and her team for the launch announcement.  On a beautiful day in that beautiful spot, it was easy to get jazzed about getting green.  If the initial response to this Night is any indication, this could be the biggest School Family Night yet.

There seem to be more and more sites these days talking about what’s wrong with schools, and I suppose there’s a need for that.  But we also know there’s a lot right about our schools, and we always like when that gets attention too.

It’s why we created our own version of “Find a School” and why we encourage you to click through and add your own comments about your school.  Let the world know what’s going right in your school.  (I’m sure it starts with a great group of parent volunteers, right?).

Hope you’ll also encourage all the parents at your school to chime in.  Our find-a-school tool is referenced by a ton of young parents (choosing where the little one is headed) and moving parents (picking a new house based on the possible new school) – and the more reviews of your school the better.

For encouraging the reviews (and, frankly, for encouraging your parents to take advantage of all the great content on schoolfamily.com), we also have a nice tool you can put right on your PTO or PTA website.

I suppose I should explain that www.schoolfamily.com is a sister site to this one.  Whereas www.ptotoday.com aims to help the leaders of local PTOs and PTAs run their groups most effectively, www.schoolfamily.com aims to help the general population of school parents do their best in the important job of getting their kids through school most successfully.  Sometimes we think of the site as a web assistant to all the work you do (as a parent group leader) in trying to explain why parent involvement is so essential.

Spread the (good) news….

I’ve already had two rants this week, so I’m going to do my best to play this one down the middle.  I got an email last night about a new PTA movie night program.  You can check it out here.

The basic gist is to get groups to put on a movie night at their school (either Bolt or Twilight) during a 4-week window in May.  That sounds good.  Sounds a lot like a certain, long-running school Family Movie Night program I’ve heard about, but that’s OK. 

But the stuff I question is in the fine print of the FAQs of the PTA program . (more…)

Maybe it’s this nasty cold I have that’s making me grumpy this week, but these news stories (started with the lady suing the PTO over raffle rules) are driving me crazy.  Now, we have a Superintendent completely missing the boat on the essential nature of parent involvement in schools. Did he miss the memo? That a district even considers charging the parent-teacher group to use the space is ludicrous.  C’mon! Shall we charge the history teacher for classroom space? 

The PTA or PTO is not, repeat not, equivalent to the scouts or the local basketball league. We’ll be happy to forward the dozens of research reports that make that clear. Ugh. <end rant> 

Not a lot of news here, but I really like the Harlem Wizards folks.  Very cool program, and the kids love the great basketball.  Combines fun family night with some nice fundraising potential.