Tackling that particular parenting challenge is the whole point of our sister site over at SchoolFamily.com. I hope you’ll take some time to check it out. I find helpful new stuff on there nearly every day.

Perhaps most interestingly, we’ve just added a brand-new “community” section on SchoolFamily.com. It’s a great place to connect with other parents and find solutions to the kind of school challenges (and joys!) you may be having with your family. I really like the interactive Q&A section, too.

As an added bonus, if you’re a PTO Today fan, the new SchoolFamily.com community functions provide a nice sneak preview of what’s coming soon for ptotoday.com. Expect even more cool functionality in the ptotoday.com version.

While apples got old quick, my mom still does treasure notes she received and loves to remember students of hers, as she reads about their exploits (college, jobs, marriages, babies) in the local paper.

That’s why I really like a new product from Josten’s (yes — the picture and yearbook and ring guys) that I think will make an excellent teacher appreciation gift. It’s a simple-to-make photo memory book that will make a great keepsake for a teacher. I know my mom would have loved it.

The class picture.  Some candids from the field trip or the classroom. Shots from the class play.  Good stuff. Cool idea for the room moms at your school, too.

In a perfect world, all of our volunteer efforts would garner this kind of praise.  It’s well-deserved, and it also serves to encourage others to jump in.  That’s also the spirit of our annual Parent Group of the Year campaign. Has your group bragged (It’s OK! It’s Ok!) yet this year?  You should. Nice prizes, too, thanks to our friends at DirectTV.

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 .First of all, why is the PTA requiring that groups charge parents or kids an entry fee for a family event at school? I can see making it optional (some groups still struggling getting past the concept that it’s OK to invest in increased parent involvement and community), but requiring an entry fee just seems opposite to best involvement practices.  And the PTA frequently touts (usually rightfully so) its leadership in parent involvement.

Now, it gets even more questionable when you realize that the PTA is making groups collect the entrance fee, and the groups don’t even get to keep the entrance fee.  It has to go in to HP and/or the national PTA (they’re the partners in this effort).   Groups even have to pay in advance just to get the kit.  It just seems odd and opposite of how most groups work an event like this.  Even when groups do charge (which we don’t recommend), it’s almost always at the door. 

I’ll be interested in a response (and welcome PTA folks to explain to me where my analysis is wrong here – I frankly hope it is and will provide the mea culpa, if so).  I imagine one response will be that: “yeah, but for that $5 every attendee gets a $5 gift card to something called “PTAdigital” (an opening-soon online store, which is also a partnership of PTA and HP).  But that doesn’t pass the smell test.  If you have 200 attendees (as PTA says they had at fall events), then that’s $1000 to National PTA/HP (zero to local unit) and 200 people with $5 gift cards (that they were forced to buy) to a PTA/HP store. 

You do get the performance license (a $150 or $75 value, depending on different factors) and the free movie (which you could rent for $3 — and then have your choice of any movie).  I’ll be interested to hear what folks think of this.  It just doesn’t feel all that well thought out to me.  I know the parents at my school would find a $5 price tag for a family movie night to be steep.  And if we did collect it, I know they’d expect it at least to be going toward our school and our kids.

I have a feeling PTA is going to need to re-think this one. Your thoughts?

Which is why I’m glad that the time has finally come when PTOs can go green in communications, remain effective in their work and save bucks.  If I can get my environmentalist badge and grow involvement and help the budget at the same time,  I’m in.

That was the theme of my January magazine column on the Green PTO.  And it’s definitely the theme of this interesting set of case studies from the Chicago Tribune of local school districts going electronic with their backpack expresses. 

It’s also why we’re so excited about our newest (real new — like 2 days old new!) free tool for PTOs and PTAs.  We call it “Parent Express Email”, and it finally makes sending professional looking email announcements and newsletters to your families simple.  Check out the Parent Express Email tool here.

The point of my column was that — while email has always been attractive option — schools and PTOs have been in a funny spot when it comes to email.  We’re not businesses that can choose (if the economics make it wise) to ignore certain customers.  Instead PTOs and schools have to send announcements to all.  So, even when half of parents had email… a PTO couldn’t go all electronic.  Adding email was more work (because we still had to do lots of printing), not less.

But today, the statistics tell us that 90%+ of parents have access to email in some fashion.  Email is now both a money saver (lots less paper and ink) and a time saver.  Even if we need to make hard-copies for a few families, the time saved on stuffing 300 backpacks and getting right numbers to right homerooms for entire school outweighs the now-small amount of time needed to reach the few remaining e-holdouts.  Now it’s a real no-brainer win.

We’ll talk about this a good deal more, but — for now — give our new Parent Express Email tool a whirl.  It’s going to make your PTO life much simpler. And you can’t beat the price.

If you’re a parent group leader, you’re bound to love it, too.  Golden parachutes? Hardly! Parent group leaders get big tarps donated, paint them yellow (extra paint from the teacher room remodel) and use them for the parachute game at the fair. Needing bailouts?  Nope — parent group leaders are the bailer-outers.

The quibble — wouldn’t pick Sarah Palin.  Despite all the attention she received for her PTAhood, I don’t believe she was a PTA officer.  We need someone who has faced the fear of having 300 families heading to a spaghetti supper, losing access to the school’s ovens at the last minute, and having to talk the local restaurant into giving up an oven during the dinner hour.  That’s the pit bull we need.

Who would you nominate?

And the babble folks even have a snarky poll (”is the PTA an evil cult or a utopian paradise or somewhere in-between?”) as a follow-up.  Wait — they’re stealing our schtick!

I can definitely laugh at parent group humor and stereotypes, but I’ve been to  an awful lot of PTO and PTA meetings, and I’ve rarely, if ever, met the “Bree” (from Desperate Housewives”) character that is so often portrayed as the typical parent group leader. More often, it’s regular folks holding on to the safety bar of life with both hands just trying to survive the ride like the rest of us.