PTO Today

For many parent volunteers, this is the time of year to consider joining the parent group in an official role. And many of you are wondering if you should go for the big enchilada—the president’s job.  Elections will be coming in the spring and these last weeks of winter are a perfect time to mull over this decision.

A few thoughts to consider:

• Don’t do it because you think it is expected of you. Do it because you want to. Maybe you are currently the treasurer or secretary and the president’s slot is opening up. You might be getting not-so-subtle nudges from your group. But if you enjoy your current role and think the president’s slot isn’t for you, don’t succumb to pressure. If you do it to please your friends and fellow board members, you won’t be happy.

• But don’t avoid it because you are afraid you’ll fail. Because you will make mistakes, but you’ll learn from them. I can recall the first meeting I ran as a PTO president. It was an early morning meeting and I was so nervous about speaking in front of the group that I couldn’t eat breakfast.  But I did drink about five cups of coffee, revving me up to hummingbird speed. I think I did my whole presentation in about 40 seconds, and some attendees must still wonder what I actually said. But I got through it, learned to dial down the coffee a bit, and found that each subsequent meeting was a little easier.

• Finally, we have many resources to help you with whatever you decide!  For instance, we have a collection of articles on leadership that can guide you as you consider your leadership style, explore what it means to lead a parent group, and learn how you can grow and improve your skills.

So, as a start, check out these articles. They’ll help you make the right choice for you.

• Are You Ready to Lead?
• The Secret to Successful Leadership
• Leadership is Learning From Others
• The Leadership Skills that Matter

And good luck!

By now, some parent groups are well-versed on social channels like Facebook and Twitter. The early fears of online hecklers or losing control have been replaced by a belief that social media helps groups connect with more parents and improves communications. Here are some of the ways social channels are making a differences with PTOs and PTAs:

Quick Reads
Amy Quigley, PTO secretary at Webster Elementary in Urbandale, Iowa, likes Twitter because she can have fun exchanges with parents that help build a sense of community, like when she tweeted, “Who’d your child get for a teacher?” before school started. Twitter also addresses the more practical concern of reaching busy parents. “We are a society of skimmers,” adds Pam Dykstra, PTO president. “If parents aren’t going to read long explanations in emails, let’s send them a quick tweet that gives them a link.”

Easy Interaction
Amanda Pittman, president of the Quail Lake Charter School Booster Club in Clovis, Calif., says Facebook notifications are great for getting parents to respond. Facebook is simply less work—a parent can react in the moment, unlike the days of receiving a flyer and following up with a phone call. The group did a Facebook post about a retailer’s campaign in which it could win gift cards. “We raised $125 on Facebook and I would say that’s a 100-percent improvement,” Pittman says. “Before, I would have sent out 600 flyers and would have gotten 10, maybe 20 responses.”

Promoting Events
Indialantic (Fla.) Elementary PTO president Tina Descovich says that Facebook can help build excitement for upcoming events. With Facebook, a group can post several quick notes leading up to an event. “If people see other people saying they are going, they are more likely to [go],” she adds. In contrast, sending out several emails or flyers would be impractical and could annoy parents.

National Walk to School Day is Wednesday, October 3. It’s a great opportunity for PTOs to help kids get to school in a healthier and safer way. Here’s a great example of a mom who runs a walking school bus:

When it comes to living green and promoting a healthier lifestyle for families at San Francisco’s Longfellow Elementary, Jacquie Zapata-Chavez doesn’t just talk the talk, she walks the walk. Every Wednesday, the former PTA president leads a convoy of students and their parents on foot throughout a one-mile route to school. The “walking school bus” doesn’t have doors or produce any emissions, and children and their parents happily hop on board together.

“We have about 100 walkers so we command attention when we walk,” Zapata-Chavez says. The group meets at a fast-food restaurant parking lot around 8 a.m., but students eat fresh organic fruit donated by the school’s nutritionist. “Then we do stretches to music while we wait for walkers, and at 8:20 we start to walk and pick up students along the way,” she explains. Throughout the hike, the group chants “Longfellow What? Walks!”

Zapata-Chavez took on “bus duty” in 2009 when the principal asked her to be a traffic safety coordinator to help ease the congestion at drop-off. “We had cars double-parked, triple-parked, parents yelling at each other, kids crossing in the middle of the street….It was just awful,” she recalls. Zapata-Chavez learned about the National Center for Safe Routes to School and won a grant from the organization to start a walking school bus program.

The weekly walk has earned the school some positive attention. Local officials, including former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and a state senator, have climbed on board Longfellow’s walking school bus. The school won a $10,000 NFL Play 60 grant and an equipment donation and was visited by a few Oakland Raiders players last fall. But the best outcome of the walking school bus so far? “Not only are we fighting obesity, global warming, and traffic,” Zapata-Chavez says, “but we are teaching our children to be good neighbors and citizens of the community and planet!”

I’m going to use my tip this week to plug a brand-new web service we’ve just launched for schools and parents and teachers: TeacherLists.com.

I think you’re going to love it. A lot. I hope you’ll give it a look and get your school and your teachers started with the service. 

Basically, we’ve created one site to host all of the classroom supply lists (both school supply lists and teacher “wish lists”) that teachers have to create and parents have to find every year. It’s completely free, really quick, and simple, and we think it’s going to make life easier for everyone this year at back-to-school time and beyond. Easier for parents to find exactly the supply lists they need from all their kids’ teachers at just the right time. And easier for teachers to get the “extra” supplies they need (and too often have to pay for themselves) to make the classroom work. The really simple url is www.teacherlists.com.

Perhaps most important, we have some pretty great prizes and incentives for schools and PTOs and PTAs that get started with TeacherLists.com. The first 200 schools that get all their lists loaded and shared will win “super supply packs” with hundreds of dollars of free supplies and more. And every school and every teacher that gets started with TeacherLists.com will be eligible for one of hundreds of additional prizes and incentives that we’ll be giving away from April right through September.

Complete details on the giveaways are here: www.teacherlists.com/prizes.

We also have a School Kickoff Kit available for PTOs and PTAs that want to get TeacherLists.com going for their whole school. It has posters and flyers and lots more to help you get the word out to teachers and parents. You can order a kickoff kit at www.teacherlists.com/kit.

We believe that anything that makes the teacher-parent connection easier and stronger is a good thing and a great fit for PTOs and PTAs. Give the site a look — I’d love to hear what you think and any feedback you may have.

Right about this time of year it happens: you can’t help but start thinking about the next school year. What teachers will my kids have? Who will be the new parent group officers? What will our group do differently at our back-to-school events to get more parents involved?

While we can’t help you with the first two questions, we CAN help you with the third! Next week we are chatting about all things parent involvement. Join us on our Facebook page  for Destination Parent Involvement! Week to get parent involvement tips, chat with other leaders and learn more about our free Back2School program and how it can help enhance your back-to-school events. And for those of you (all?) trying to recruit new board members for the 2012/13 school year, invite them along. The feeling of support and connection they will get from Destination Parent Involvement week may just be the ticket to have them say yes to a board position!

Best part: stay tuned to our Facebook page next week for a big announcement about our 2012 Back2School program giveaway. You’re going to love it!

Not familiar with our Back2School program? Here’s the scoop: the program is designed to help your group make a fantastic first impression on parents at back-to-school, get parents involved and keep them involved all year long! Here’s what Back2School participants receive:

• Copies of Jump In! magazines and high value coupons for parents
• Back-to-school event planning guide
• A parent involvement banner to hang at your fall events
• Chance to receive free parent sample packs for parents, full of goodies
• Exclusive online access to new back-to-school and parent involvement downloadable tools
• Tune in next week for more details…

We’ve been hearing from many of you about your Family Reading Night events. No shortage of reasons or themes to celebrate and encourage reading. It’s so much fun to hear all your ideas. Leap day presented a once in four year occasion to inspire kids to read and Dr. Seuss’ birthday is March 2nd! We would love to see photographs of your Family Reading Night crafts, activities and event in action. Share them on our Facebook page to brag about your event and give other parent group leaders ideas.

If you don’t have a Family Reading Night in your play book, there is still time to host one this year. Our kit is filled with:

• Step-by-step instructions
• Promotional materials and ideas
• Creative activity suggestions
• Suggestions for read aloud books
• Theme and snack ideas

We posted earlier this week about a school district in South Carolina that is considering mandating parent volunteering. You might imagine there are many different opinions on this topic—a peek at our Facebook post about this story will attest to that. But no matter what you think of mandates, it’s clear that parent involvement makes an impact on a student’s academic success. Two stories published today tell us that.

First, the state of Florida published a ranking of 3,078 public and charter schools based on academic performance in standardized testing. The number one school was Bevis Elementary in Lithia. The school reports it was the recipient of 13,000 parent volunteer hours last year and said the many hours parent volunteers spent tutoring students contributed to these results.

Meanwhile, a Grand Rapids, Mich., publication reported on a presentation at Hope College from the founders of the Watts Learning Center in Los Angeles, a K-8 charter school founded in the late 1990s in a historically poor neighborhood. The school has been named California state school of the year four times. It requires its parents to volunteer, attend parent workshops, and participate in parent-student-teacher meetings.

Congratulations to both of these schools.

For anyone who has every run a school event or fundraiser, you understand the importance of parent involvement. Chances are, you’ve felt the pain of not having enough volunteers. But, would it ever make sense to require parents to help out?

That question was just put before the School Board in Charleston County, S.C., by a group of parents who want the school district to require that parents and guardians volunteer eight hours of their time each school year. The School Board has no decision yet. The proposal goes as far as to suggest that parents be rated for having met their obligation as “highly engaged,’’ and, if they have not done their volunteering, to be labeled as “emerging.” In Charleston County, reaction has been understandably mixed. The Parent Roundtable – the group promoting this concept – says the idea is to help parents understand how to get involved and it isn’t intended to be judgmental or punitive. That might be hard for some parents to swallow, giving the ratings system. Some parents questioned why the school district would want to create more work by establishing a volunteer tracking system. One parent went as far as to say schools “can not legislate morality.’’

While we’ve heard this mandatory approach has been successful in such environments as private and charter schools (parents opt in when they join the school) it also raises questions about the purpose of volunteers and it underscores how challenging it is to recruit and retain them.

Hey, we all wish we could get a 100% volunteer response like the folks in South Carolina want. But in the meantime, here’s a suggestion for a more down-to-earth alternative from PTO Today. It’s called 2 Hour Power, a free volunteer pledge program where you ask parents to each volunteer for two hours per year. The idea is that it’s a manageable amount so it’s easy to get people to agree. And if they have a positive experience, they’re likely to volunteer a lot more.

Well, it’s January and the holidays are squarely behind us. Every January I do the same thing: I sit down and regroup about how Christmas and New Years went. I write down what went well and what I would change. I jot down decorating ideas, fun family event ideas, and reminders of what made me crazy this year. I think back-to-school season for PTO, PTA, HSA leaders is a lot like the holiday season. You do your best to be organized, and then you dive head first into this insanely busy time. Have you regrouped with other volunteers on how your back-to-school season went?

What would you like to do differently for back-to-school 2012? How can you make it better? Now is the time to think about it. I bet getting more parents involved at the very start of the school year is TOP on your list!

Here’s where PTO Today comes in. Make your back-to-school life a whole lot easier and productive — sign up for our Back2School program. It just kicked off and boy, are people signing up quickly! They know that participation in our FREE Back2School program is a fantastic way to get helpful tools and resources to make a great first impression on parents this fall. That first impression can make or break your year, in terms of involvement!

Here’s what Back2School participants receive:

• Jump In! magazines and coupons
• Back-to-school event planning guide
• Chance to receive parent sample packs
• And more!

If you are not familiar with our Jump In! magazine here’s the scoop: It’s a magazine that’s brought to you by the same team that produces PTO Today magazine — for you to pass out to parents at a back-to-school or parent/school event. Parents love the insightful articles that are meant to help parents bridge the school-home connection, as well as high-value coupons from family-friendly brands.

If you’d like to hear what other parent group leaders thought of the Back2School program, check out their testimonials and photos. If you still have questions, visit the Back2School FAQ. Sign up is here.

So, what are you going to do differently for back-to-school 2012?

Ever wonder when it is worth speaking up about something in your role of PTO leader?  This question may be on the mind of Kristen Pierotti, PTO president at the Lincoln-Hubbard Elementary School in Summit, N.J.

Recently, she raised concerns about a school uniform issue to the local Board of Education. The response? The board clearly indicated it had more important items on its agenda. Ouch.

This story started when Kristen Pierotti heard that some parents had raised a question about adopting school uniforms. “I was never trying to dictate what the district as a whole should do, ’’ Pierotti said in an email discussion with PTO Today.

Pierotti said the PTO decided to do a survey to determine if the issue of school uniforms really was important to parents. She said she sent out more than 200 surveys and had a 50% response rate – and 75% of those parents said they were open to the idea of holding a pilot program to see if uniforms would really work.

The issue was then forwarded to the school board, which, in published reports, essentially said it had bigger fish to fry.

“I appreciate that there are initiatives of greater consequence, however, I don’t see that in itself is a reason to close the door on something [for which] there may be a majority of community support,’’ Pierotti added.

So, apparently, a public put down will not deter this PTO. Pierotti said her hope is the school board approves the idea of Lincoln-Hubbard piloting school uniforms so it can be a “test run for the community at large’’ in the near future.