Our school secretary prints out the information by class for our directory. All we have to do is copy, colate, bind and distribute. Before we have her do it, though, we send out a form to the parents giving them an option to not be listed.
We also put a section on the form where they can join the PTO if they missed us at registration. We actually get quite a few members this way. [img]smile.gif[/img]
Thank you everyone who contributed information and ideas for this. I am bringing this to our members on May 17th. I suppose I will volunteer to do it,unless someone else is willing. I think this will be a very important thing for our school to have. I would do it on a voluntary basis and hope we have a good response. The school sends out a packet of info during the summer and we always include our info in that. Perhaps we can include a questionnaire explaining the benefits of having one and see if there is parent interest. Thanks again!
Debbie
Our school has had a directory for at least the last 10 years. It is a great tool for students, parents, teachers and the PTO. We send a flyer home and parents write down the info they want in the directory and omit what they don't want. It is so handy for kindergarten parents or new parents who what to set up a play date. I use it when ever I want to call parents to volunteer. One book that has it all.
We don't get as many kindergarten parents who fill out the info as we would like because they are new, but I have found the last two years that when I attend the Kindergarten orientation and explain the benfit of this, more kindergarten parents provide more info for the directory.
We use our directory for contacting Parents for snow days because our school sometimes does not make the television. We also use ours for when a car breaks down we can call someone in our neighborhood to bring our kids home. (We don't have a bus system with our school)
Our school system has a pretty strict privacy policy, so we put our directory together on a voluntary basis. We send out forms at the beginning of the year (with all the other paperwork) asking people to list their contact information, and then signing at the bottom saying that they understand that this information will be published in the school directory. We also mention that the directory is for the sole use of patrons of the school. If we do not get a form, we do not put their information in the directory. The person who compiles the directory gets a student list from the school to compare the forms to, and then if she has not received one, she'll send out another form just to be sure it wasn't just forgotten, rather than deliberately withheld. Using this system has worked out well for us...we usually get the majority of the kids in the directory.
We give the directories to each family, rather than sell them. The other thing that we do is have a "cover contest" at the beginning of the year, and have the students submit drawings to be considered for the cover of the directory. The drawings are based on the school year's theme...we usually get 15-20 entries.
I think our parents would revolt if the PTO stopped publishing the directory. As it is, we get calls when its late being distributed. I use mine all the time. Like JHB said, it's invaluable in a large metro area.
Our directory data comes initially from the district computers as a tab-delimited file. The process has varied considerably over the years, depending on the computer skills of the directory chair. I think the best next step is to import the data into word. There's always lots of tweaking like combining siblings into one listing and deleting unlisted phone numbers Ultimately the chair imported the cleaned up data into Publisher so she could lay it all out neatly. You probably don't want to use a database because there's alot of variation in the listings. For example, a few families might want to list a second phone number, or even a second address, but most families won't.
Creating a school directory is a big undertaking at our school of 700+ kids. It's essential to find someone with strong pc skills. A softwrae program might make it a little easier, but you still have to get the data into the program, and be able to accomodate exceptions.
