When my mom asked if I would drive her all the way into the city to see Aunt Theresa in the hospital, I said no prob. Ian and I had to get out of the house. The air quality had degenerated seriously due to all the work being done on the roof.
Aunt Theresa is an old family friend from the Bronx who is sick with bone cancer. Without any close relatives, a couple of old friends like my mother have had to step in to care for her and her paperwork. Always a strong personality, Aunt Theresa isn’t going gracefully, and my poor mom is taking a lot of abuse as she holds the old woman’s hand.
My mom’s responsibilities keep expanding, despite her increasing age. She minds five grandkids and countless sick old people. She even helps out at a convent in town that houses nuns put out to pasture. Mom drives them to the hairdresser and says the rosary with them weekly. Mom badly needs some time to herself.
On the way into the city, Ian sat contentedly in the backseat. He thought he was going to score a subway ride and was really ticked off later when the A train didn’t materialize. While Ian dreamed of trains, Mom and I chatted about a recent phone call from the PTA.
I let Jonah’s school principal know that I had an academia background and offered to help out in the school. I don’t know what I had in mind. Maybe helping out on a grant or serving on a committee.
Instead, I got a call from the PTA lady, who asked for “Mrs. Husbandslastname.” No where in the modern world does anybody still use titles, except within the public schools. Ever since I graduated from high school, I have called all adults by their first name. All this Mrs. stuff drives me batty. When I corrected the PTA lady and said that I was Laura Mylastname, she seemed completely baffled. Usually, I’m good natured about the name business, but that day I had PMS and demanded to know who this was and what it was about.
She said that the principal has said that I was interested in helping out the school and that I could shelve books in the library. I’ll admit it. I was rather stunned. I thought my skills could have been better spent elsewhere. Would they ask a guy to do that? Is that where they put the pesky parents to isolate them from doing any real work in the school? Shouldn’t the schools be paying someone to do a job like that?
It doesn’t help that I’m not really all that enthusiastic about our town’s PTA. It’s a bit sorority sister for me; the moms get a little too enthusiastic about pajama bingo night. I’m sure that they raise some needed money for the schools, but there’s a lot of silliness, too.
Women are doing vast amounts of unpaid community work. Some of it real important stuff, like my mom does carrying for the babies and the old. Some if it is pointless busy work. Some of it is an excuse for a social life.
It’s difficult sorting through these demands of time deciding which is important and what’s ridiculous. I have the feeling that most guys never have to deal with these decisions. Nobody expects them to drive to the hospital or to checkout school books. Men’s time is too precious.
Like I said, I was pissy that day. I’ll probably call back the PTA lady and do the library grunt work for an hour or two, and I’ll draw the line there. It’ll also give me the chance to wave at my kid in his classroom. Just don’t ask me to work on pajama bingo night.
Apt. 11d 
I have a lot of problems with the way some schools treat mothers, and the grunt work is a part of it. I did go to our kids’ school and offer myself as a library worker and I liked working there, made friends with the librarian, and got kind of an inside view of the school and how it works, very interesting.
But it seemed to me that male (father) volunteers were always recognized and their contributions valued more than the women’s. In a school where dozens of women volunteered regularly, the only public recognition and thanks went to some electrician and carpenter fathers who would now and then contribute to a very short-term project.
Another bad experience was when all the mothers of pre-school children were asked to come in for a presentation offered by the school district personnel. We all went in, listened to some 25-year-old tell us how important it is to read to our preschoolers, and then staff members passed out bookbags and permanent markers and told us to COLOR our bookbags. Somehow I can’t imagine anyone expecting a room full of fathers to color bookbags.
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Hey Laura,
Well, as someone who started in the whole school involvement thing as hesitantly as you have, it’s a tricky business. You have to get involved in order to really figure out how you can contribute on a higher level than grunt work. You can’t figure out what you’d be good at doing for them and they can’t figure out what you’d be good at unless you get to know each other a little.
I do publicity, fundraising/grantwriting for my kids’ school — and the powers that be know not to call on me for pajama bingo involvement, except when it involves writing a press release about pajama bingo and E-mailing it to the local newspapers.
So it’s a chicken and egg situation. You have to get involved to be involved in the stuff you want to be involved in, you know what I mean?
Anyway, you should cut yourself a huge break what with having a special needs kid and keeping up your academic career and all — only do this stuff if you want to. I thought that what Emily did was great — getting involved in the Special Ed PTA and helping guide families who don’t have a clue through the bureaucracy.
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I think you’re right about what they ask fathers to do, but my son has just started school and my husband (SAHD) has volunteered, so we’ll see what he gets to do. From what I know, around here, they generally get parents (mums) to help with reading in the classroom when they volunteer direct to the school – fundraising is the P&C (equivalent of the PTA I think). The other usual thing is helping out in the canteen (tends to be one professional and the rest volunteers). I don’t know of anyone who’s been asked to shelve books (or colour in!) but I’m new to this.
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I get asked to go along as chaperone on school trips (always wear ear stopples on the bus to the pumpkin patch!) and there is a general call for parents, male or female, to come to weekly reading sessions. In kindergarten, there is a general call for parents to help opening milk cartons, etc., and I know dads who’ve done that, as well as moms. There are some retirees who come in to help with one-on-one reading help, and I have only seen women (let me remind the reader, though: there are a LOT more widows than widowers). As far as I know, we hire for re-shelving books (one of the bennies of being taxed $19000 per student for the local schools). Volunteer coaches for the (boys) teams my kids are on are almost all men, one woman who used to play pro basketball. My wife works 60+ hours a week, and I work 40, so she has been in only once, to sell tickets for the school fair, and we haven’t been snarked at for that.
At the day care, where we will be phasing out after this summer (yes!) I had enormous scarcity value for a long time as the only dad who could define a construction type project and do it, no one was going to waste me on grocery certificates or running the auction – but I think any woman who had the same skills would have had the same experience. And lately there are more dads who can do this sort of thing, and I am getting less of this kind of deference.
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There are more moms than dads helping out at our school, but I think we have more dads than most. We are probably at a 60-40 ratio here. We have so many jobs for parent and community volunteers that they are like unpaid staff that help run th school. It’s not socializing, it’s vital to the school. We have parents who hand out lunch, organize books, work in classrooms, work in the office, drive, chaperone, instruct for special projects, fund raise, work on strategic planning, serve on the board, do publicity, write grants, supervise on the play ground, coach, sub, all of it. Our school is built on parental involvement. Last year in our junior high program, I had 100% parental participation. Now some parents volunteered every week. Some walked with kids to an art exhibit once, but everyone helped. 25 % of our families were free and reduced lunch. Every family can help, every school needs to show them that. Parental involvement is more important to a thriving school than any other factor.
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In our school, the parents are only involved in fundraising and shelving books. They have no say in curriculum, hiring choices, or any real school function. They don’t even get involved in the school lunch menu.
There are zero men involved. A friend’s husband attended a meeting last year and was laughed out of the room. The final fund raiser at the end of the year is only for women. Men are not invited.
I just have very, very little free time. I know it’s the right thing to do to help out in the schools, so I will do something, but I just hate girls-only, popularity clubs. Our town PTA gives me the heeby-jeebies.
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I hear you, but what if they really need help shelving books because they share a librarian with another school? Sometimes the stuff that needs to be done isn’t glamourous.
And you might have been called “Mrs. Kidslastname” by someone who only knew that she was calling “Jonah’s mother.”
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I think this clubbishness can be present in many different nonprofit environments. For example I’m struck that this dynamic is not present in our kids’ school. But I am strongly reminded of our local neighborhood association, also very clubbish and insular, that is almost non-functioning it’s so closed off to newcomers. I’ve seen many people laughed out of the room at neighborhood association.
Are women more likely to be taken for granted by nonprofits? I do hear what you’re saying about mens’ time being “too valuable”. But I also know that in my family it’s my husband who hates to turn people down while I have no problem doing so. I blow off meetings; I tell people I can’t help them. Meanwhile my husband is running around like crazy helping with all kinds of events at church and school simply because people know he will help, and thus keep asking him to do stuff.
I get a little more pissy when it comes to the adulation heaped upon any guy who helps at all. I can’t believe how little effort is required for a guy to be considered a total hero. (“Hey, that father actually SHOWED UP to a school event! What a hero!!” “Wow, he came in the kitchen and helped with the dishes! What a hero!!”)
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I also wonder if whether spending time raising money, people should be working for school reform. Why should public schools and expensive private schools need all these volunteers? How has our school systems failed to the point that they are so dependent on such involvement? And what happens to schools where well-educated parents with free time aren’t available, but instead it is new immigrant parents who both work two jobs and still have their kids qualify for free lunch.
School reform, not mllk-container openers, is how we should be spending our time.
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Michael,
It’s true that a lot of this school volunteering sounds like overkill, and maybe a lot of it wouldn’t be necessary in the best of all possible public school systems. However, I would argue that school volunteering by parents has value above and beyond the value of the labor performed. School volunteering gets parents into the school building, it familiarizes parents and teachers with each other so they feel like they are on the same team, and it ensures that parents have some notion of what’s going on during that mysterious six or seven hours a day when their kids are at school. These are huge benefits.
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I work in a library, and my first thought when reading about the shelving-book assignment, was that they may actually think this will take advantage of your academic background. Simply because so many people are confused about what librarians do, versus what other library workers do. “Hey – shelving books! That’s almost like being a librarian! It’ll be perfect for someone with an advanced degree!” Never mind that we pay college students $5.15 an hour to do that, and most public libraries hire pages that are straight out of high school.
My second thought is to agree with Allison; you can’t find interesting volunteer work unless you start with some grunt work. Try talking to the librarian while you’re sorting books; maybe she’d like someone to help her fill out grants.
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We don’t have kids yet but I have been interested in gettign involved in some way. We’re DINKs but we plan on having kids ina few years and I’d like to contribute a bit more, even if its an hour here or an hour there. The question I have is: is this something my wife and i can do without having kids in teh school system?
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It bothers me that a school would give such narrow choices of how parents can help out. It would seem that any school would welcome a parent to listen to a struggling reader, or even make copies. Amy Pruss is right, being part of your kid’s school gives you invaluable insight. Even if it’s just a couple of times a year. I have always found that talking directly to my children’s teachers sometimes let you see where some real needs are – even if the school doesn’t. So sometimes you end up helping a particular teacher, rather than being organized by other parents. Some teachers feel overwhelmed by parents in the classroom, but would welcome an extra hand on an excursion to a park or art exhibit. I agree it’s frustrating to have to beg to help.
Oh and Kip, my kid’s school uses non-parent community members all the time, check around to some different schools. Boys and Girls Clubs are also great places to volunteer.
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It’s not just a gender issue; it’s also a class issue. In our new school, there are a lot of lower-middle-class/working-class stay-at-home moms who do a lot of grunt work and resent the professional moms (like me) who waltz in and say they want to write grants (like me). I was warned of this by a former-professional stay-at-home mom friend who spends basically all her time at the school and does a bit of everything, really a lot of everything. So I showed up to lug props for the visiting theater company to get cred–a la Allison. It was worth it. That said, I have refused to have anything to do with the PTO at both schools my daughter has attended–way too sorority-like for me. I’d rather lug props or shelve books.
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First of all, thanks to all of you for not mentioning a terrible wording error that appeared in the original post. Teaches me to write while watching American Idol.
Kipster. Pats on the head. Tammy would probably have good suggestions. I would also suggest that you guys think about doing work in a school outside your district. After you have kids, you’ll probably do a lot there. New York Cares is a great organization that specializes in bringing in young people to do good in the community and schools. Maybe they have some suggestions for places in CT.
I have to admit that that Terry Hecker article really got to me. Part of what she said that she regretted doing was all that community work. She said that she should have been working instead.
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Been there. Done that. I’ve got three kids and as a military family, we’ve seen a lot of schools. I also have a Ph.D. and teach part-time at the local university.
Unfortunately, what my experience shows is that the administration really makes the call for HOW the parents will be involved. In our current school, I’ve had an absolute blast going out into the community and soliciting contributions for the Spring Carnival raffles!
In the previous school, I found myself at a “holiday party” (we were much too PC to ever talk about Christmas) with 3 other moms — ALL OF WHOM HAD PHD’s — cutting things out of construction paper and gluing them on with super-glue. And oh yes, we were “supervised” by a Korean dad who “would have loved to help but he was wearing a suit and didn’t want to get dirty”, don’t you know.
The scariest part was that one of my friends was actually an economics professor (at an Ivy League school) and she mentioned to the teachers that she thought there were some actual errors in the grade-school economics curriculum, and was basically told to go away.
In my opinion, if you feel like your skills are being undervalued and underused, it may be a sign of something deeper — basically an attitude on the part of the administration that says “Go away. And let us ‘educators’ do our jobs, Mrs. Whatshisname.”
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Thanks, Mom of 3. I’m glad that this thread isn’t dead, because I’m still stewing about it.
I do think that our school administration has that “Go away” attitude. Real parental involvement, like the type at Lisa V’s school, is extremely important in public education. I want real parental involvement, not just because I have a huge PhD ego, but because I want to make a difference.
I also don’t want to be a sucker. All this school stuff is more invisible, unappreciated work by women. I’m willing to do it for my kid’s sake, because I love them, but am I willing to continue doing shit work for the community, especially when the community doesn’t even seem to want my help? No.
Volunteer school work is also fundamentally risky. You can’t put bake sales on your resume, if your husband should split. It is okay if you are only putting in a hour or two a month, but there are some women putting in hundreds of hours a month at the schools. The PTA should be forced to wear a warning label that participation could be hazardous to your future financial well being.
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I’m so glad I don’t have to face the PTA gauntlet yet. My mom was president of the PTA when I was in high school (she presided over the grade school PTA while my little brother was there) and as I recall, there was less intrigue at the court of the Borgias.
Oh, and my Catholic high school was completely flummoxed when I asked to be called by my maiden name, despite being married. They came up with some weird amalgamation of my husband’s name and my name on all their mailings, which I found kind of funny. At this school, women alums apparently do not hang on to their own names once they marry. Or if they do, they sure as heck don’t try to set the alumni office straight.
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