PCW PA Presidents’ Program

Lee Arrowood, Outgoing President of St. Patrick’s Parents Association, opened the program with a short talk about the challenges facing Parent Association Presidents and some suggestions.

Highlights included:

Obtaining buy-in from your community:

• Spend first month or six weeks of your term listening in
  meetings with key people at your school: outgoing PA
  President; outgoing members of Executive Committee;
  key volunteers, administrators and parents.
• Look for themes in what people are telling you
• Create a strategy for your term: develop 5 things that you want to
  accomplish during your tenure. Examples: improved website;
  better communication; more diverse volunteer participation
• Make all items actionable, with objective way to measure success

Managing Through Current Economy:

• Look for novel fund-raising ideas
• Leverage outside resources: use PCW speakers and calendar, as well as events at other schools

Developing Talent For the Future

• Compile a list of people to watch the following year
• Keep a spreadsheet of who was asked for what job and why they declined
• Offer secondary roles to people you are grooming for leadership

Housekeeping

• Make sure by-laws, job descriptions and voting procedures are up to date
• Use technology for school-wide volunteer recruitment
• Keep good records of what was done in each position to avoid re-inventing the wheel each year

Following Lee’s talk, the group had a wide-ranging open forum discussion. Issues raised included:

• Communication
• Volunteerism – breaking jobs into manageable bite sized pieces
• Fundraising – particularly in this economy
• Policy-making
• Budgeting
• Relationship with Head of School
• Diversity in volunteer group
• Parents’ reluctance to attend meetings
• Welcoming new families
• Appropriate role of parent business community for networking
• Losing volunteers to workforce due to economic downturn
• Parent education efforts
• Time management for parents
• Documentation for future volunteers
• Input from students
• Institutional tools – software to manage volunteers

Discussion of Issue of Volunteerism:

• Break down jobs into manageable sizes, so working parents can participate
• Cut back programs to those that parents really care about to encourage attendance and deal with time management concerns
• Vary meeting times to capture different audiences
• Use technology instead of meetings to alleviate time management issues; for instance, post videos of speakers on website
• Use volunteer software: PTO Manager is a good one – it is inexpensive and permits people to volunteer on-line
• Create notebooks for each job and capture them electronically
• Succession planning: have someone you’re grooming shadow the person in job

Discussion of Fundraising:

• Most PAs receive funds from mandatory dues; some are voluntary
• Dues ranged from $25 -$150
• New ideas for fund-raising instead of auctions

Discussion of Expanding Diversity of Volunteer Pool:

• Hold meetings at different times
• Remind parents in every e-mail that they are welcome to attend all meetings
• Assign people at meetings to welcome new people
• Bring a guest speaker to meetings as a hook to get people to attend PA meetings
• Personally invite new people to meeting; let old people know that it is their job to bring in new people; mandate that every Executive Committee member bring someone new to each open meeting
• Hold meetings on campus instead of in someone’s home
• Thank people for helping
• Wear name tags on campus that include job titles and committee names
• Be open to new ideas
• Use personal e-mails and personal phone calls