Parent Volunteers: Things that Make you Go Hmmm...

I think it will always be a challenge to recruit volunteers in a public school, but it seems like this year has been particularly difficult.  In class tonight we discussed the differences between parent involvement in the lower grades and the higher grades.  I don’t think I had necessarily thought about this before, but when it was mentioned in class tonight, it made perfect sense.  Trying to get parents to volunteer suddenly becomes a whole new game.    

What I started to wonder is, how much of this is related to how involved the students are?  When I think about how involved my students are I think about my student leadership class (Student Council.)   My Student Council consists of 85 students.  In my Student Council most of these kids are involved in at least one, if not two or three or more other activities on campus.  These things aren't really an issue for elementary school kids...right?  So these are the kids in my school that are highly involved, and participate in everything.  I need parents to volunteer to work at least one event every two weeks.  When I need to call a parent these are the parents I reach out to because these are the parents I know and have access to.  Once I started to think about, I realized most of the other organizations on campus are probably utilizing the same bank of parents I’m trying to pull from.  This causes a problem.

In elementary school, all the kids are in the same class and rotate through the parents asking each parent to rotate sharing the responsibility of volunteering or bringing an item.  All parents are asked to participate and all parents are asked to be involved.  Without having all the extracurricular activities, a parent is not spread so thin trying to spread all their time between every activity a child is involved in.  Not only that, but many of the kids are proud to have their parents involved and happy their parents are at school helping (Blaney, 2005).  By the time students reach high school, lots of them are embarrassed to see a parent at the school, or sometimes even want to keep school completely separate from home.  This creates a serious problem for teachers like me who desperately need parent help.  

In Joyce Epstein’s article, School/Family/ Community Partnerships:  Caring for the Children We Share (2001), she outlines some of the challenges for teachers, parents, and students.  When I read these, I thought about making schedules for the parents, but more specifically for the teachers and other sponsors that I might share volunteers with.  For example, my STUCO president is also involved in golf, cheerleading, National Honor Society, and Spanish Club.  Her mom is one of my most frequent volunteer’s, but also one of the busiest on campus.  If I were to utilize Epstein’s method and make a schedule at the beginning of the year of all the most important dates to share with the parents, especially the frequent volunteers, and the other sponsors, this might help some of my volunteers “become more available.”  Epstein also discusses the importance of informing the students of the importance of contributions of parent volunteers.  If the kids understand that without the parents they wouldn’t be able to have senior handprints, Homecoming Coronations, Renaissance Validations, any elections, or many of the other things parent volunteers help Student Council complete, they might be more willing to help recruit their parents (like they were in elementary school.)

Ultimately, I think these are ideas I will work to incorporate and I’m flabbergasted it never occurred to me before that some of the lack of parental involvement is such a simple problem.  I also think if I explain to my kids that the parents needing to be there is less about them and more about the school…?  Who knows?  Being a little more organized and opening the lines of communication between organizations is never a bad idea (Epstein basically says this too.)   I think of at least 1,000 other students on campus who aren't involved in any activities on campus, so they aren't being asked to volunteer at all.  I'm not sure how to reach any of these parents, but this could be a post for another blog.   For now, I'm going to work on making better use of the few I do have.

                                                           References

Blaney, S. (2005, Feb 10). Finding your way in middle school and high school.  Retrieved from http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Finding_Your_Middle/

Joyce, E. (2001). School/ family/ community partnerships: caring for the children we share. In J. Noel (Ed.),Multicultural Education (pp. 192-198). New York: McGraw-Hill.