PTO Today

If you’ve been reading these tips for a while, you know how much we value parent involvement. The research makes it so clear that increasing parent involvement is perhaps the most important thing your group can achieve.

As your group gets better at involvement, you should think some about how you can increase your impact even more. Some of the most effective first steps to bringing parents in and making a connection are fun, welcoming events like a movie night or a carnival or a spaghetti supper. I’m a big fan of the value of community around a school.

As parents do start getting engaged, though, the research makes a strong case for integrating your family events with academic goals of the school. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to have the language arts teacher droning on to parents about the reading curriculum. But what about a Family Reading Night ? How can you merge other academic goals and your family events? That’s a second-level involvement step that can have an even greater impact at your school.

The whole thing is kind of a ladder. Like getting your kids into swimming — first you get them to the pool, then they dip their toes in the water, then they splash around some, then they can maybe swim a few strokes in the lanes. Creatively connecting the classroom with your family events can be another step on the ladder for your school next year.

Have you been to our clip art gallery recently? Worth a visit — we’ve added lots of new colorful images so you can jazz up your flyers and newsletters.You can download any or all of these high-resolution image files, then resize, crop, or edit them in any way that works for your group’s needs. They’re free for parent group use in print, online, or anywhere else.

We hear it a lot this time of year: “I am so excited to be the new PTO president… but I’m also nervous!” Or, “I had a great year this year, but I am already thinking of ways to improve the board for the next school year.” Well, whether you’re new to the job or an old pro, our FREE New Leader Kit will be your new best friend. The insider tips will give you the tools you need to lead with confidence — so you can relax a little this summer.

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!

What was once a very minor annoyance is becoming a more common challenge for many PTOs and PTAs. We’ve tracked several communities where school parent-teacher groups (PTOs and PTAs) have been banned from using the backpack express to communicate with parents.  I’ll explain below, but cutting to the chase — this is horrible policy that does harm to schools.  And it doesn’t have to be this way.  Nuance and a backbone are both wonderful things.

For background, here’s a post on our message boards about this topic.  And here’s a story from Minnesota about one school board making this poor decision.  And a follow-up from same paper on the after-effects to date.

The real failing here is equating the local school PTO with the local karate school or the Church down the street from the school. That’s hogwash.

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Wow — this is the harshest sentence we’ve seen yet for a PTO or PTA embezzle case.  This Arkansas treasurer convicted of taking $23,000 (and that’s just what they can prove).

We do like the fact that this case was prosecuted and taken seriously. Too often, groups or schools try to sweep these cases under the rug or prosecutors downplay the damage.  Make no mistake — this is stealing from kids and violating a trust.  There’s also often even further damage to the support and involvement at a a particular school for years.

More than worth it to use smart, basic money hanbling procedures.  And to get insured.

Former president from outside Denver arrested — after her kids tried to play lookout on her getaway effort  –  for stealing from her group.  Grrrr.

In this case, the method was forging her co-signers signature on dozens of checks.  Our most basic of financial best practices – making sure that a non-signer opens the checking statement each month — would have likely prevented this one.  Also hope they’re insured. 

This recent column of mine on diffusing PTO drama has been garnering a lot of feedback, so I thought I’d highlight here in the blog, as well.  Seems to have struck a chord with many.

You can read it, but the big point is that all the drama in our PTOs – the big tiffs, the hurt feelings, the perceived slights, all of it — gets directly in the way of building broad involvement and growing community.  yes, there are a certain type who live for the drama, but most of us have plenty of stress (especially these days) and shy away from more.  If your PTO is stress-filled, then is it any wonder you struggle to bring in new people or lots of new people?

Give the column a read.  Would love to hear your own strategies for reducing the drama.  Whaddaya got?

Yeah, I think so.  I certainly feel a bit less unique these days as a dad in the PTO and PTA world. And this story from the Chicago Trib adds some more color to the dad involvement issue.

We’ve covered this in several ways over the years. I wrote a column of my thoughts about what works for bringing in dads.  And our editorial folks covered it with a feature a year or so ago.  There really are some basics that can make a big difference.

Are you seeing any progress in the dad area?  In a silver lining I’d rather not face, I imagine the current economic climate may result in more dads with time to get involved with school. This is likely a good time to add some effort around attracting and welcoming dads.

Thought I’d take a minute to recommend our newest tool.  It’s called “Parent Express Email” (we’ve been calling it PEX around the office), and I think you’re going to find it very, very helpful.

Basically, it’s a very simple (and free) tool for sending professional-looking emails to your parents.  (If you want to jump ahead to the tool without reading my thoughts… you can check out Parent Express Email here.  I’ll only be a little bit hurt. )

For years now, I’ve been very conservative about PTOs and email.  But I think the time is finally right for nearly all groups to take the plunge in a big way.  I wrote a column on this general topic of PTOs getting greener in our January issue. (more…)