PTO Today

My tip for you this week is to join us on what is quickly becoming a very powerful new resource for PTO and PTA leaders — our PTO Today Facebook page. I’m loving all the idea-sharing that’s happening over there.

I was amazed to learn from a recent survey (but perhaps you won’t be) that 71 percent of our PTO and PTA leaders are active Facebook users. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since PTOers are such active networkers offline, too.

One of our discussions this week is about your best family event this school year. Hope you’ll “fan” us, join in the discussion, and start your own PTO Facebook networking. I’ll see you there.

Still thinking about family event plans for spring? I recommend utilizing our Family Movie Night kit and info to put on a relaxing flick night. There’s a good element of fun with the added bonus of being one of the easier family nights to run.

You can order a free Family Movie Night planning kit on our website, plus find info on all of our School Family Nights. To me, these kinds of involvement events are a welcome mat to deeper involvement. Don’t charge admission. Don’t give folks the hard sell that they have to help out. Just make it a great night. The good news is that some of your attendees will have a great time and feel more comfortable getting more connected. That’s how more involvement develops — not through guilt or the like.

We’ve also recently added a brand-new Family Movie Night ”group” in our Community section on ptotoday.com. Here, you can share what’s worked and what hasn’t with other leaders running the same kind of event. We’ve even got a movie tracker, so you can review which movies worked best for school nights. I really like the movie Cars, for example, but it was a terrible choice for our last Movie Night — just way too long for 90 K-5th graders. Wish I’d known that before we picked it.

Good luck with all your involvement efforts!

I figured I’d take this opportunity in early July to speak to you as a parent, as opposed to as a PTO or PTA leader. Funny, isn’t it, how sometimes (often) our work being good PTO leaders makes it even harder to find the time to be good school parents?

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.

As the son of a 30-year first-grade teacher, I can say with great confidence that teachers don’t need any more ceramic apples. None. Nada. Zippo. I’ll just leave it at that.

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.

That seems about dead-on perfect, no?  Love the fact that this Tennessee super honors parents. Love the fact that this PTO leader was the big winner.  And love her very humble and very appropriate – we do it for the kids — reaction.  Cool.

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.

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…)

While I’ve never been mistaken for a leading environmentalist, I do love it when going green also ties in with saving money.  I know turning down the thermostat saves trees (somehow), but — I must admit — I’m more motivated by the smaller gas bill.

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.

(more…)

Can’t agree more (except for one quibble below) with the spirit of this column form the LA Times — all of our bureaucracies could use a good dose of the typical PTO or PTA leader “get it done” mentality.

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?

Some interesting and creative reading over on babble.com. Hate is an awfully strong word, but — as a parent group leader — there are days when I can relate to both of these very different perspectives. This writer now hates her PTA after having been a leader.  But this one expected the worst but now loves her PTA (which I actually suspect is a PTO, but that’s just a quibble).

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.

Looking for a programming/service idea? Like what these guys did with a community health fair. Looks like three different groups got involved, recruited some neat local speakers, and even roped in the Radio Disney crew for some fun. Cool.