As I have mentioned in posts previous, my husband and I try to be involved in the school as much as we can. We like to offer our services to them in almost anyway we can spare. I have a great amount of respect for teachers and the amount of work they do for our children. They give themselves over and over to help them succeed and so many times the parents at home don't do anything to continue on or foster their work.
My husband and I are members of both the fundraising committe and the advisory committee for our school. Both aspects are important to how the runnings of the school impact our kids and the funds they have available for certain activities, feild trips and equipment. With a declining rural population, the school budget can not be expected to make due on it's own.
I find some weeks that the positions are a great frustration. We have close to 300 students in our school. 5-7 parents come to the fundraising committee and only a couple more come to the advisory council. We do have a greater percentage of people willing to give their time during field trips and a few willing to give their time in the classrooms, but for the most part, parent involvement is very small in our school. This is an issue with a lot of schools so shouldn't be overly frustrating.
It does bug me though. Some of these other parents are my friends. I hear them complain and try to run down or degrade the decisions that are made in the school, yet they are, for the most part, to lazy to come to the meetings to voice their opinions or suggest change. If they were too busy, worked in the evenings, had young kids they couldn't get away from, or some other valid reason, it would be less frustrating. The truth is they are just too lazy to support or make a change in their kids school.
Our school has a gaming license...we need a certain amount of volunteers to work these casinos, and bingos. The funds derived from them are huge in the support of the school, and we have so many issues trying to find the low number of parents to help out at each one.
Another frustration is the person who is the chair for our fundrasing committee. Being a leader involves having a positive outlook, being in support of your goals and the objectives we do to achieve them, having an open mind and a willingness in spirit. Without any of these things the group will not be able to survive and function the way it should. Our leader for this oraginization lacks all of these attributes but does seem to enjoy having the "power" to control and dismiss others input based on her knowledge.
Without the leader displaying the right attributes how are we supposed to get beyond the limitations of the group and reach out to the parents to encourage involvement? It starts at the top and sometimes the top needs to be blown off of things. I'll let you know how that goes....
No comments:
Post a Comment