Trying to avoid PTO burnout

Posted in school
by Lorain County Moms

By Aisha Sultan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I got suckered into the Parent Teacher Organization.

When the PTO vice president personally called and mentioned that the principal said I had offered to help out, I was backed into a corner. (Isn’t offering to help out at your child’s school the equivalent of asking about the weather? It’s supposed to be small talk, for Pete’s sake, not a blood oath.)

At any rate, I ended up on the committee organizing the trivia night silent auction.
At the first meeting, I noticed that there seemed to be very few people in the room. I tried to calm my fears: Maybe all the volunteers were running late.

Mark Rogers, the one who had called and was heading the whole deal, broke the news: No one else is coming. It’s just the four or five of us — with six weeks to create, plan and execute a rather large, complicated affair. Not to mention that I had already committed to chairing another rather large, complicated event on the same day.

Oh, Lord. This is why I need help flexing my atrophied “no” muscle.

But before I could begin to find a way to worm my way out of this mess, I caught a look in Mark’s eyes that I recognized all too well. It was that defeated look of burnout on the brink. The “I-know-I’m-going-to-get-slammed-with-all-of-this-work” look. I couldn’t bring myself to back out of the very small time contribution I had already offered.

“When you send an e-mail out to 60 people, and you have posters up in the school for volunteers and fliers that go home with kids, and then have four people show up to a meeting, that’s frustrating,” he said, later. “There are about 10 to 12 volunteers who have given their blood, sweat and tears.”

Of course, the entire school benefits from the hard work of those few parents.
But how long can we expect them to stick around?

Mark has three young children and is involved with his son’s Cub Scouts troop and coaches a baseball team and volunteers with his church and works a demanding, full-time job. His wife is a part-time teacher, juggling her family’s schedule.

They don’t have loads of free time.

Three years ago, he showed up at a PTO meeting to find out why his son’s classroom didn’t have wall dividers. He wanted to know how the money was being spent. They sucked him in, too. There are some weeks when he devotes a few hours a week to his duties, but this past week, leading up to the trivia night, he was easily putting in 30 to 40 extra hours. He is driven by the vision of the new playground he wants the children and school community to enjoy. He can imagine walking around the new track years from now and realizing that money from fundraisers such as the trivia night helped pay for it. He wants to help create something lasting for his children’s school.

I, on the other hand, got exhausted watching him and his two tireless counterparts.
Mark knows it’s not a pace they can keep up.

Chuck Saylors, president of the National Parent Teacher Association, says there’s a similar crisis in many schools throughout the country. The number of parent volunteers is dwindling, and committed ones left behind are overburdened picking up the slack.

“The level of need has never diminished, but the talent pool has,” he said. There are fewer stay-at-home parents to devote time to schools. More families have two working parents, often working longer hours or even more than one job. Kids’ extracurricular schedules are busier than ever. Let’s face it, there are only so many hours in a day, and too many of us are already burning the candle at both ends.

Saylors said the uber-PTA volunteers can end up scaring off new parents from getting involved because they assume they have to make a similar time commitment and know they cannot. So, the national organization has come up with a new campaign to help get new blood in schools. They are asking parents to commit to giving three hours of their time in the entire school year. Not three hours a week or month. But three hours at some point during the entire school year.

In fact, he said, if you just have one hour to give helping out at your child’s school, he wants you to invest it.

“I’d rather have 100 people contribute one hour a week than two people putting in 50 hours each week,” he said.

There’s a compelling self-interest beyond simply improving your child’s school. Research shows the more involved a parent is in his or her child’s education, the better outcomes for that child.

I like the idea of three hours over a school year. I did the math. I’m good to drop out once this event is over, I figured.

And, just as quickly, I’m reminded of my complaints about the constant fundraisers at school, which prompted the original offer to help find a less painful way of raising money.

“It’s easy to complain,” Mark said. “If you really care about it, get involved.”

He knows there’s still lots of work to be done before the school gets its new playground.

But he’s tasted a sweet, smaller victory.

Next year, they’re putting up permanent walls in the school’s classrooms.

Aisha Sultan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Contact her at asultan@post-dispatch.com.