Wow. I’ve never been ASKED to volunteer for anything other than field trips! I wish we were allowed to be so involved in my daughter’s school. We aren’t even allowed inside the building after pre-k, and we’re only allowed in the front hallway. We don’t do parties. We send things in for parties the teachers and TAs handle. Programs are done in the evening if it’s something they want the parents to see. I have to buzz into the school twice a week to get my daughter early for therapy. Every time, I have to fill out a form, show my ID, and wait there for her to be brought to me. Is this weird? I mean EVERY TIME,and I’ve been doing it twice a week since this school year started. They should know me by now. But it’s standard procedure I know. But still…they look at me like they’re clueless who I’d want and why I’d be in their office.
I was a TA and I don’t recall much parental volunteer work then either, but then again it was the same school.
Here in Missouri they boondoggled the lottery (a tax on people who are bad at math) and riverboat gambling on the people with promises that the money raised would “go to the schools”. Fast forward ten or so years and schools are still having fund raisers for candy, popcorn and other useless crap. Corner a state legislator about it and they mumble something about “the general fund” and walk away.
I don’t find the PTA ladies at my son’s school to be “elitist snobs” per se. But I do find that they live in a different world than I do and their expectation is that the other parents also live in that world. Which isn’t unreasonable, actually. My town is very socieconomically homogeneous. Whether they work or not, most of the moms are married and upper-middle class. I’m divorced and broke as shit. I’ve never felt snubbed or anything, but I just don’t fit into the program.
When my son was in first grade, and they had the beginning of school meeting thing, they pushed for people to commit to activities and committees. I approached the head muckety muck and explained that my life was very much in flux and so I couldn’t commit to anything, especially months down the road. But I’d like to help. I figured there was a list of “general volunteers” that would be contacted if they needed extra help with this or that. Nope. Either I joined a committee for the whole school year or nothing. Oh well.
That said, I do find ways to contribute. But not through the PTA.
That’s so odd to me- a list of general volunteers is something we relied on heavily. Need someone to step in and take tickets for an hour, or read a book to a class or whatever- check the list and start calling. See who can.
Why these PTAs want to shoot themselves in the foot like that is odd to me.
I put myself on a volunteer list once and was called in to help tidy up the little tykes for Picture Day. Each kid was given a black plastic comb, and it would have been my job to make sure their shirts were buttoned, there were no stains on their faces or clothes, and to comb their hair so it would look nice. But it was a case of too many helpers, the old pros from the PTA had it well in hand and I really wasn’t needed. After standing around awkwardly for about an hour, I left, wondering why they thought they needed ‘help’…I also volunteered in the elementary school cafeteria to just keep an eye on things and preserve the peace. That was kind of fun - sometimes I’d see my little girl and she’d tell her friends, “that lady there is my mommy!”
Yes, I’m honestly saying that…so long as you’ll acknowledge your hyperbole as such. That is, of course I wouldn’t call someone that has a history of, say, pulling a knife on PTA members (see? I can do hyperbole too!). But that’s not what is under discussion here – your original words were: “Frankly, I wouldn’t want someone around who thought so little of me either.” No “hostility”, no “troublemaking”…not even active “unpleasantness”. No – just “thought so little of me”.
You just can’t be that delicate of a little snowflake, can you?
No, I’ll return the rhetorical flourish and pointedly not forgive you. From what Juliana has said, the PTA members have never called her – though she went out of her way to make it known that she’d like to volunteer. For the situation described to which you specifically responded, jumping to “causing problems for everyone else” and “make everyone else suffer” at this point is mere argumentative self-defense on your part.
I suspect, based on nothing more than the 2 posts she’s made in this thread, that Juliana is generally pleasant and would love to contribute her time and effort – likely with little fuss and reasonable accommodation. Are you going to claim that’s not the case?
Oh, I understand the point you were making. Really, I do. And I think – in someone else, not you, of course – that expressing that point might very well indicate a…what were the terms?..snobbish and elitist viewpoint of someone who makes it all about him/her (or their little clique, anyway). Or, if I were to be generous, I’d class your original post as an unthinking, knee-jerk response from someone grumpy from a long day.
I volunteer here and there, but mostly I find that the hardcore volunteers want nothing to do with newcomers. They have their clique, and love or hate em it’s who they know and are comfortable with (new to town? suspicious, drives a foreign car in michigan, suspicious) . The plea for volunteers? it’s only to appease the principal - these ladies have no intention of giving up control! Lots of time they are the spouse of a school employee, so they also get to keep an eye on business.
SO fine, I do attend parties, field trips (only if the bus ride is short, school bus trips are awful). I’ll throw money their way for carnivals, fundraisers but no longer do I put my name on the list for the school wide volunteer jobs.
No, not volunteering doesn’t make you a bad mother. But people who want their kids to have extra equipment and activities but don’t want to put any money or effort into raising funds for said stuff are selfish louts. And there are a LOT of selfish louts out there.
What I’ve noticed over years of volunteering at school fundraisers (I don’t have kids and don’t want them, but as the child of an elementary school teacher, I often got volunteered when they were short-handed) is this: whether it’s parties during school hours or an event at night or on a weekend, you see the same handful of faces over and over and over and over again. The stuff during school I can see; there aren’t a whole lot of people whose schedules accommodate coming to the school between 8 and 3 on a weekday. Fortunately, for most of those events, a handful of people is all you really need. What I don’t get, what I will never get, is why it’s always like pulling teeth to get people to work a once-a-year event for 4 hours on an evening or weekend. But it always is, and so that same handful of people wind up doing the lion’s share of that work, too.
Back when Mom’s school did the gift-wrap booth at the mall as a fundraiser (they try to do a couple big ones rather than the kids selling shit all the time), it was always the same dozen parents who were there all the damn time. And this was a 700-kid school–if every parent in the place had volunteered for a single 4-hour shift, they’d have damn near had the whole thing covered. But nobody would, so you had that dozen parents, the school staff and their families covering the whole damn thing. Most of them working 3 and 4 shifts at the booth a week, every week. It was crazy and they stopped doing it after a few years.
Same thing with the fall festival. One Saturday night a year to make a fun event for the kids that raises a lot of money for the school. People can’t be arsed to come work for a few hours, nor to send stuff for the silent auction. This year the volunteer situation was so bad they didn’t even have enough volunteers to put even one person at every booth, so the principle just canceled the whole damn thing. (They wound up having it a few weeks later after a whole raft of people had road-to-Damascus type revelations that they could spare a few hours on a Saturday night once a year after all.)
I agree completely with this (and with the rest of the post, even though I didn’t quote the whole thing). I have a full-time job and don’t particularly enjoy working around kids, but I volunteer (as does my wife) because my kids’ schools need the help, whether for office work (copying, filing), cafeteria help, organizing/running fundraisers, etc. And it’s always the same incredibly small percentage of parents who end of providing the volunteer services because so many people can’t be bothered for whatever reason.
My youngest daughter’s school is so large that I’d guess all of their volunteer needs could be met if each family would give them a couple of hours over the course of the school year. As it is, those of us who are willing to volunteer end up giving the school a ridiculous amount of time precisely because we’re the only ones who are willing to do it. And yes, I do resent it, but I still do it because to stop would be punishing the school (and, by extension, the kids).
I accept that some schools are in bad financial situations but I can’t imagine the need for so many volunteers as you all are talking about. Office work? My elementary school had two secretaries and I can’t imagine a parent coming in to do their jobs. Someone said something about having “never worked so hard in his/her life” as when they volunteered with the band - I did band all through school and my parents’ jobs were to 1) sign permission forms letting me go to the symphony a few times, 2) attend my concerts if possible, and 3) tolerate my squawking as I practiced at home. I would have been humiliated if my parents had been hanging around the school by the time I was old enough to hold a clarinet.
I think it’s wonderful that so many people are willing to volunteer but it does seem a striking shift just in the short time since I was at school. My mother never once went on a field trip and I don’t think it occurs to her that she should feel guilty about that.
Frankly, I think most “volunteer opportunities” are created so that parents who want to feel more connected to their kids’ school can. If you want to be at the school for hours every week and you enjoy that, that’s great. But I think 90% of the “fundraising” and busy work that the PTA comes up with are just attempts to make people feel useful. At my son’s school, I can’t imagine that three book fairs were needed this year. Or that four evening “family picnics” are really adding anything to my child’s education. You see the same people over and over again because those are the people who are interested in making their child’s elementary school an extension of their family life. Those activities exist because those people want to participate in them. Other people have different social and community activities that are as or more important to them than the school.
First, YES, I meet other people’s kids almost daily. The whole reason I visited this thread yesterday afternoon was I was still feeling grumbly at having to attend a stupid thing at my 1st-grader’s class yesterday.
I am not a warm-fuzzy person. There are definitely some among my kid’s peers who are, shall we say, not very likeable.
But the majority of the kids are, at the least, innocuous, and at best, a hoot to talk to on occasion.
So, to repeat, yes, I know there are SOME kids that are hard to stand. My objection was to people making a blanket statement that they only like their own kids and don’t like other kids. How can you make such a prejudiced statement about any group of people? The really obnoxious kids are the minority.
I just don’t see any way it can be good for a kid to be raised by a parent whose attitude toward them is, “Well I love you, but the rest of your kind can go to hell.”
And I know you posted with a wink & a nudge, so sorry if I sound like I’m taking it too seriously.
First of all, I absolutely do not understand your snarky and rude tone. This is a MPSIMS discussion about a fucking PTA, calm down over there, sparky.
Secondly, if it is true that they’ve never called her (and presumably have never communicated with her in any way-- which, in truth, is not something I had thought of before), how would they know anything about her then? Do you think they PTA pulls up tax returns for the families prior to calling for volunteer work?
On a fundamental level, I agree with you that either way is stupid- whether they aren’t calling her because she offended them or because of some perceived financial situation- ultimately, though, I tend to be a firm believer in that famous quote “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” She’s awfully worked up about some people she appears to have never met because she’s determined that they are out to get her because she isn’t rich. Fact is, it’s probably something much more mundane than that.
That may well be the case in some places; I am confident it is not the case in my kids’ schools. And, in fact, I do not enjoy it. Most of the volunteering we do is in the form of office work - helping to make copies and prepare the weekly folders that get sent home with the kids. If volunteers didn’t do it, the school would have to either (1) hire additional office personnel or (2) make the teachers do it.
On the occasions when volunteers aren’t available, my kids’ schools choose option (2), which obviously takes the teachers out of the classroom and deprives the kids of quality instruction time (which gets replaced with “reading time” or busy work).
The other major volunteer opportunities are for fundraisers, which include a gift wrap sale, as well as few annual events like a Halloween party, a Spring fun fair, a couple of book fairs and a couple of movie nights. All of the money raised goes directly to the school, which uses it for a variety of things, including subsidizing field trip costs for familes who can’t afford those trips.
So a lot of families benefit from the volunteer work in those situations - either they benefit by having the teacher available in their kids’ classrooms for more time or, in some cases, they benefit from getting their kids’ field trip fees subsidized. Yet again, only a very small percentage of those families provide the volunteer work that benefits their kids.
This isn’t exclusive to schools, of course – it’s the same with my HOA. A few families provide services, such as participating in pool clean-up day or making general repairs, for which the HOA would otherwise have to pay. If the HOA did have to pay for those things, we’d have to raise dues. By volunteering, those few people help keep the dues lower for everyone.
So, to respond directly to the OP, I do not think a refusal to volunteer at school makes one a bad parent. I do, however, think that it is selfish (assuming that there is, in fact, a need for volunteers).
