Inclusion has been a big focus of our PTA this year and I think we have done an excellent job with it. Some broad changes and lots of subtle changes have made a difference. We have made a conscious decision to market and brand our PTA with this goal in mind. We send all PTA correspondence home on bright lime green paper and include a logo we had one of our parents design. It features the acronym TEAM, standing for Together Everyone Achieves More and features silhouette people. In fact, all of event flyers feature silhouette people so that everyone feels included. Age, race, and ethnicity are purposely left out so that everyone can envision themselves in the PTA.
Other examples of inclusion:
-Gender neutral terminology (Room Parents vs Room Moms)
-Always wear name tags
-Volunteer Forms offer "in school" and "at home" opportunities to include working parents or parents with young children.
-Vary day and times of meeting to accommodate working and non-working parents
-Host a morning and early evening orientation for room parent volunteers for example, rather than only morning.
-Always thank and acknowledge volunteers.
-Request input from members and even give an anonymous option
-Actively recruit incoming kindergarten parents and parents of new students
-Encourage community volunteers (we have a business owner serving as a chair person this year)
-Have our room parents or teachers send a request for volunteers to each of their classes to give a more personal approach rather than school wide
-Created a Facebook group to further communication an share pictures
-Host events at school or other public location
-Have members who can translate in Spanish if needed
-Involve the kids whenever and wherever possible. Kids want to help and it gives them pride. A bonus is you often get a parent with that child. For our back to school nights we put kids in bright green t-shirts that said Help Me and they handed out PTA literature and encouraged parents to join the PTA.
-Stress that we as board members are fellow parent volunteers
I am happy to share anything I have created or chat more via email or phone. I can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
I loved this article! I ran for PTA President because I so strongly believe in the benefit of having a ton of parental involvement and hate the old generlization that PTAs are made up of a bunch of moms that have nothing to do all day but hang out at the school. I remember years of volunteering for things at our school after hearing the complaints of the chairpeople that "no one helps" --never to get a return call. It was insulting to be ignored because I wasn't one of their "clique"--My goal as president was to get everyone in-the-know about school activities and events, give people a voice, connect people's skills and interests to volunteer opportunities, identify ways that our volunteers can positively support school objectives among others. We used so many ideas from PTO Today and it has been outstanding--we have made great things happen. We have had an outpouring of volunteers who are coming up with ideas and making new and wonderful things happen! There is one issue, however, that continues to pop up--some of the veterans on our Executive Board are really opposed to opening this up to the entire school community. Their negativity is subtle yet powerful. They present great ideas but do not let others get involved. They treat the PTA room as their living room and when newcomers enter, there's an eerie silence. They use this as a chance to "hang out" at the school all day and get overly chummy with the teachers, calling them by first name. I will not give up on rallying the troops and keeping everyone interested but they are really a detriment to the positive changes that parents are looking for. Any suggestions about how to deal with a Chairperson who will only work with her friends and will not support the work of newcomers with great ideas?
The scary thing about this situation is my group fell into this thinking it was a better idea for attracting new comers. We thought it might be more welcoming if we started meeting in each other's homes. I am guilty of hosting one of them. I never realized what a turn off it would be for outsiders. Now that I am feverishly trying to recruit new volunteers, the social event that I was planning for the core team, is now going to take place at the school instead of my home.
WE have and are having the same problem you are with the comfort zone. But it isn't by the lack of tring to get people to volunteer. We just had a comm. meeting last night and we can't even get them all there. We have a meeting everyother month, but we still only have a couple of people there. But we have decided that isn't what we are going to worry about so we worked on all the fundraisers we have done and that hasn't even been good! we are starting to wonder if anything will work for our community. We are open to any ideas.
As I read yoiur article-- I started thinking this sounds like us more and more-- we are very open to new peolple joiing -- but e have grown comfortable with ourselves-- we do introductions- but we have also talked about going out for drinks and hanging out with each other-- and to an outsider just starting out-- they might not feel very welcome or may feel umcomfortable around us.
so, I will remind myself it's never too late to get new parents involved and try and revitalize myself to get more parents involved by introducng myself, event outside the building before or after school in case at this time they may not know me--
It's a volunteer program started by two PTA moms a few years ago.Basically, it is asking school families to promise they will volunteerat least three hours during the school year. The way we use it is tosend home a comprehensive list of every volunteer opportunity on thefirst day of school, right along with all the other papers that go homethat day.
The National PTA picked up on it and now sponsors it, or they were,last I knew. Our group went PTO a few years ago and I don't visit thePTA website anymore. The program is similar to the Two Hour Power thatPTOToday has. There's more info about that here or for Three for Me,the url is three4me(dot)com.
