A resource for PTA and parent involvement project ideas

Newly Elected President...

I am a newly elected President for a school that has not had a PTA in over ten years. I have been trying to get this started since about July, but we have just gotten this PTA really off the ground. During Parent-Teacher Conference Day, We had a membership table set up, and m newly elected board was introducing themselves to parents, and trying to get members, and a feel on what the school needed. The issue here is that during this process, many parents actually ran from us, or treated us as though we were carrying rats on our shoulders. One actually said, "Oh NO!!!!" when asked if she wanted information about our new PTA. Do you have any suggestions for ice breakers for this type of parents, or suggestions for an event to help us break the ice. I want this to be a successful school year.

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Permalink Reply by Kirk Corless on January 18, 2010 at 8:21pm

I would suggest putting out a PTA memo or in your next newsletter and ask the parents if they would want flyers, annoucements, etc sent to them by email or on paper, even go one step further I would ask the parents to go green and go e-mail. Save a tree!! You can even have a contest like for example for every parent that signs up as a PTA member and elects to go e-mail, a prize can be won.............nothing too fancy or expensive of course.

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Permalink Reply by Jenean Witherspoon on January 19, 2010 at 9:24am

Alicia, I would also politely remind them that the work of the PTA supports the teachers. Support that they like to have. You both need to work together in order to get the information across.

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Permalink Reply by Fratney PTA on March 18, 2010 at 10:19pm

We are also a young PTA and started the year with a team of 6 people. Our small team met a few times to brainstorm what we wanted to be able to do and came up wih dozens of ideas. Then as we went through the list we saw patterns emerge and realized that we had 4 themes. That was our focus for the year. We only took on items that fit the 4 themes and we saw that our goal was to build our reputation. Our mindset was that we did not have to do too many things, but what we did, we had to do well.

Define your focus and let that be your guide as people try pulling you too many directions.