School Time: Make Time for Your Kids

Sounds simple enough right? Make time for your kids, but if you noticed the title of this article, it was SCHOOL TIME.

Still sounds simple enough, make time for your kids and for their school time. Also sounds like common sense, and you would think that all of this would come easy for people who have children in their lives.

I found out differently, and was rather shocked.

It started out innocent enough, join the PTA, be apart of your child's education. You've all seen the signs hanging around your child's school. However, how many people stop and think about what this involves?

You go in for the PTA meeting, and then are asked to be a room parent, or should I say room Mom, considering no Dad's chose to come to the meeting (not saying this is the situation at all schools) and "be apart of your child's education." You are then asked to contact each child in your child's class to ask for donations, funds, and volunteer time for this and that and so on.

Do not get me wrong, I love being involved in my sons school, I love being able to help when needed, and I love being in contact with other parents. The being in contact with other parents is actually the problem as strange as it may sound. One other thing that is failed to be mentioned in the PTA meetings is that because of privacy policy issues you can not just contact parents out of the blue, even if you have all the contact info from the year before of being a Room Mom/Parent.

Instead you must send letters home with each child, and cross your fingers that some parents reply to you with the info you need so that you can contact them when their child's class or the school need something.

Most parents will most likely oblige and send the phone number information back to you. Then the other portion of parents will just ignore everything you send and hope that you quietly go away. For the simple fact that they just don't want to be "bothered" with the requests of: can you send $10 for a fruit basket, can you send in a donation for the class project, can you help out with a fun room day, and so on and so on.

More parents need to realize that especially in a public school setting where funding may not be the best, or where there really just is not enough to go around, they may need to help out, and will be asked to help out. Ignoring contact from the parents that give up their time, energy, and funds to help out their child's school or class isn't the way to go about this.

Here are some tips for those of you out there they may not like the PTA/Room Parent methods: ask your child's teacher each year if there is something extra the class needs, ask if there are any occasions that they feel they could use your skills, ask for them to contact you for class projects that require some sort of "investment" from you. Let teachers know up front if you can not afford to be sending in money for this and that, if you hear that there is something going on around school that you want to help with either monetarily or volunteer wise then approach a Room Parent/Teacher/Administrator and ask questions and let them know that you would be more then happy to assist anyway you can.

In other words, take the time for school time, make your child feel like they can count on you to help, they can count on you to be there, and be apart of the system that we as parents, and caregivers require to educate the next generation of great minds and leaders.