To wonder how to get school parents to volunteer to do anything?

[FishfingerFlinger]

I’m a somewhat reluctant volunteer for the school PTA - only reluctant because I have a full-on job (12hr+ days most of this week) another volunteer role and am frankly frazzled.

Trying to get volunteers to help do small tasks for the school fair and no one will do ANYTHING. Everyone wants the school fair to happen. Everyone moans if it doesn’t happen. But they think the magic fairies make it happen?

Some schools seem to have an abundance of volunteers making elaborate fairs happen. All I’m asking is for someone to man the bat the rat stall for half an hour and I can’t even get that.

What am i doing wrong here?

Most kids enjoy this sort of stuff. So imo kids are missing out if parents don't step up. My view is that if your kids enjoy it and you can see some value in it for them, then it's not fair constantly to coast along on the back of other parents giving up their time unless you have a good reason for not being able to help. It's just another thing that comes under the 'boring shit we do for our children' category, alongside organising and attending parties, helping with school trips, producing costumes for World Book Day and stuff like that.

Fuck me are people blind! The government has reduced funding so much that for many schools in this country they are relying on groups like the PTFA to pick up the slack. It is so depressing to think that parents haven’t even noticed how the money has shifted from governments to parental support.

We’re lost in this country, absolutely fucking lost.

I’d love to be involved in the PTA and kids events, but I’m a single parent working full time.

All the meetings are held at 9am or 12 noon at the school- just impossible.

Im on the group chat, but often only get requests to volunteer the day before, or way too soon to arrange anything with work.

OP - you can’t be working 12 hours every day, otherwise you’d never be able to attend meetings??

Calm down love.

From experience, the hour shift on bat a rat turns out to be 'half an hour just starting up the urns' in the canteen and five hours later, having been left to cater for 800 people's teas and coffees on your own, you get chucked a half roll of bin bags and told to make sure the caretaker knows you've finished because everybody else has gone home.

Never again.

Find they're always full of cliques and there's usually a bossy head girl type. That's what put me off. Plus worked full time.

Pick up the slack for what?

Are you paying the rent,electricity and gas bill for the building?

Are you topping up the staff wages?

What is this PTFA money being spent on? What gap in education are you filling in?

Absolutely this! I’d happily donate lump sum at start of each year to avoid the asks. The “Come in fancy dress and donate £1” drives me mad too….even home made fancy dress can be £10+ on materials, so I’d rather donate that and avoid 11pm sewing and gluing
Same here.

The issue is that the parents OP is talking about won't be happy with a donation either.

Even if the PTA pulled right back on events, these parents would still be chewing everyone's ear off about how Bluebell Primary had a full brass band for their carol service and mulled wine (tilts head and side eyes), oh it must have been glorious for the children of St Paul's to have had a pottery workshop arranged for them to make artisan Christmas crafts. Our PTA don't do things like that. It's such a shame our children miss out".

They're the takers in life. They're not ambivalent about the PTA. They expect things to happen, but are unwilling to lend a hand.

Treat people with respect, simple as that. Impossible though for some.

The one time I did volunteer was enough for me to swear I never would again. I agreed to be part of a small group tasked with gathering donations from local supermarkets for a school event….the sheer headache that the event organiser managed to create out of this relatively simple task was painful. It genuinely took 4-5 times more man hours than it should have. I would wake up to her multiple rambling voice notes, text messages day and night. Completely disorganised, no clear instructions….a gentle suggestion that perhaps a list of what’s needed would be helpful, which we could divvy up - totally ignored. So no one had a clue which shops had been targeted, what had been secured and what was still needed. Requests for a shared document to record this information in were completely ignored and yet more rambling voice notes ensued 🤯

Never will I risk being caught up in such utter nonsense again!

Really good points here. Every single one of my friends who have children still have jobs, rather than being SAHPs. What do you expect working parents to do, if your even is during a working day/working hours?

Why are you saying people don’t have to take time off at weekends? People absolutely work weekends! I have to be on call to deal with emergency incidents on some weekends as well as my weekday job.

Totally agree that parents shouldn’t moan if they don’t volunteer, but I think a lot of us would rather these events just didn’t happen. They are also not cost effective. I saw my friend have to buy a box of chocolates to donate to the raffle, so her son could wear non-uniform to the fare, where raffle tickets were being sold for less than the cost of the chocolates.

Childcare is difficult.... I don't help much at DDs school events because I have younger children who need watching. So do many others. Realistically the only way I would be able to help is if there was a tent you could drop your kids off at while you were volunteering. Would require yet more.volunteers though!

God, where to start.

We have a school fair coming up. There are over 100 volunteer positions (most of them) vacant on the electronic signup sheet - everything from bric a brac through craft activities, bouncy castles, stalls run by each year group etc. It needs someone to go through it with a red pen, like yesterday, and streamline the fuckery out of it. There is just far too much going on.

...leading on to fears that if you do sign up you'll be there for fucking hours.

The politics and bear traps. If you do candy floss at our school, you will basically short-circuit the 300 year old school hall. Yet no one fucking tells you in advance or, you know, rethinks the provision. "Man the BBQ stall" actually means "design a BBQ menu that appeals to everyone and their dog, is vegan friendly, gluten free, appeals to all price points etc. Oh, and source all the food. And the PTA actually wants to approve the menu before you crack on. Actually, do soup and mince pies. Yes, in July." Also, "Why don't we...." and then the person fucks off.

That's before you get on to people's time / other commitments / caring responsibilities etc.

I will support ours because I value what they are doing and I believe in collective effort but it is nuts. For context, this is a school with a very wealthy cohort where most of the PTA and fully half the parents are senior in business etc. There are better ways of using and engaging us than asking us to stuff jolly jars or man cake stalls.

Does your feeder secondary school have a leadership club? If so get them to volunteer and give them some sweets in return.

Our school has a post dated cheque handed in each year for $200, if you volunteer 10 hours of your time... which can include attending the pta meetings (virtual ones too) you get the cheque back. No volunteer hours, cheque is put in the bank.

I find this is the best scheduling website https://signup.com/

OP works 12 hours a DAY, not a week

"I don't have time" line boils my piss.

Our group of friends jokes about how "if you need someone to help, find a busy person" because it's the same people who run everything and are far busier than others who don't.

It grates hearing how others are "too busy" when you clearly know they aren't.

People think they can just buy their way, whilst bemoaning the lack of community/events.

Let’s put it this way.

MN is full of people wishing they could get their kids into private school, so they could benefit from all those amazing things that private school kids benefit from that most kids never get a sniff at.

In my experience our PTFA raises money to give our kids a small taste of some experiences outside their normal school curriculum, like a tiny taste of what it might be like to be offered the vast opportunities that private school kids get. It is a tiny bit extra, a trip to a museum or a concert or just anything that feels slightly special, slightly extra.

I wish they could get everything the private school kids get, but this is the best that we can do for them, and it is a fraction of what they deserve. it relies on lots of parents wanting to create those opportunities for the kids, giving up time and energy to give them something slightly more than the most basic education you could imagine.

I volunteered once at my child’s school. I won’t do so again as it seemed it’s the same people who just want you to watch what they are doing. I kept asking what could I do? But they’d done it so many times and knew exactly what they were doing and I was there just to watch.

@HereComesMaleficent obviously every school is different but my daughter’s primary PTA raised thousands of £s.
It went towards items such as
Replacement books for the classroom book corners.
Replacement toys for Nursery and KS1.
Equipment to use at playtime (skipping ropes, balls, hula hoops etc).
Plant boxes and seeds/growing equipment for the playground (inner city school with no field).
Equipment for Forest School.
Whole school trips to the theatre.
Leaving party for Year 6.
Fund to help pay for trips/uniforms for families struggling (this was done discretely with no knowledge of who receives this help to PTA members).
Benches for the playground.
Shade for the playground.
Equipment for after school clubs such as art/crafts, board games, footballs.
Ice lollies for the end of Sports Day.
Plus more that I can’t think of right now.
Now you could say these are all “extras”. Extras to supplement the National Curriculum. Do schools need them? Surely schools should just teach the National Curriculum and that’s that? No fun? No doing something just for the pleasure? No extra experiences you might not be able to provide at home?
But wouldn’t that be a bit of a boring school? Do you really want your children to attend a school like that?
We might as well just go back to Victorian style schools of sitting in rows learning dates by rote. Because without PTAs (or other forms of donation) that’s how schools will end up.

Go on, for a laugh, tell me what time the maths evenings begin? Is it 3:30pm, like the parents 'evenings'?

I'm a teacher too and we can't get parents or our staff to volunteer for anything. Our school runs on the staff who are 45-55 who trained in the era of "it's really important to do extra curricular stuff so the kids have a range of stuff to do"
We are actually having regular meetings about how to entice younger /newer staff to do things . They don't even want to socialise at any basic level. In a job that is so people based it's mad.

The constant fucking moaning from people who do fuck all is bey0nd apalling.
Of course some people are one pareht famillies, are carers for eldwrly patents, or siblings, and have dc with asn. Those who cant do it shouldnt feel obliged to.... But frankly the majority in my area just cba, and at best help.out once whilst expecting hand-holding to help them buy cakes or balloon arches or giant elves or whatever god-awful crap is required by Them.

Not pta, but dc out-of-school activities. It was eye opening as to the sheer brass necked entitlement of some parents.

And YES, I would absolutely prefer to give a donation than spend 20x donation amoint on glue a c sparkly cakes.

Facebook post with this kind of motivational poster. Just explain that it can't happen without volunteers. Explain in brief the what amazing things the money made is used for in the school...guilt trip them a little!
1 hour slots.
This is what our PTF did last time. Many volunteers including myself helped out.

The problem is, it’s just more “wife-work” isn’t it? How many of the Dads volunteer? How many bake the cupcakes, make the Easter bonnets, dash to the supermarket after work to buy something suitable because it’s “wear pyjamas day” or “green day” or “blue day” or “polar ice caps day” or “be your favourite animal day”
bring a book day, buy a book day, rainbow day, bring in plastic bottles and £1.32 specifically in 1p pieces in a named clear plastic bag….”donate a kidney day”?

Almost every week it’s something and there’s an element of “compassion fatigue” or more accurately “mental-load fatigue”

There must be a lot of social responsibility boxes to tick on the OFSTED framework these days, because there’s so, so many things going on every week that require parental participation. If there were fewer, and they were more meaningful, I think you’d stand a better chance of a good volunteer turn out.