First I'll admit that I will be attending my first PTO meeting next week. Being a working parent I have been involved in our small town Junior Woman's Club and have volunteered for PTO sponsored fundraisers for years but I never have been to a meeting. I am hoping to become more involved and at the least more informed. So, please bear with me.
I have been very involved in the Multiage curriculm my kids have been a part of in our Grade School, a 1st through 3rd grade curriculm with 3 teachers/3 classrooms for about 5 years now. Parental involvement is a significant part of this program, parents sit on 3 committees and decide on one large fundraiser and one small one a year for our major field trip and discuss and make decisions about other parts of the program. Parents provide some supplies such as for art projects or food for some events or come together to produce a musical involving the kids each year. This does not involve a monatary gift so it is not difficult to do. Parents form a 3 year realtionship with the teachers and we get together several times a year as families. This curriculm is one of a kind in our 6 grade school district. We have one middle school and one high school. We are also facing some financial problems and tring to deal with them. I have also been to several school board meetings.
This is my concern and I was hoping to get some views on the matter. Our District Curriculm Director has made some decisions regarding filed trips this year. Our PTO can not provide the teachers/classrooms with field trip money any more; teachers can not write grants for field trips; parents can not donate anything (money, places, etc.) for field trips; and finally parents/teachers can not have fund raisers for field trips. His reasoning is that “the kids are coming into our middle school with to many varied experiences.†Our district has issued a mandatory $10.00 field trip fee for each registered studemt in the district weather their class takes one or not. Field trips have been reduced from three per classroom to 1.5. Of course many teachers and parents are upset.
I suspect the reason for his decision is because of the field trips our Multiage teachers have written grants for (totaling $10,000 last year), and because as parents we hold a fund raiser each year and go to places like Chicago's Shed Aquarium and the St. Louis Science Center depending on what the kids are studing. The district does not pay for these and we use charter busses for our major one. Multiage parents either take advantage of the fund raiser and sell to family members or pay $40.00 for each child/parent. We have 100% parent participation on this filed trip.
Anyway, sorry for the long explanation but I did want to explain about our Multiage program because I think it does play apart of his decision. What do you think of this decision? Other than the noise our districts parents are about to make at the board meeting tonight, through letters, and a petition, what can we do to reverse it? There has already been an exception made for our sixth graders. This exception was made before the start of school, before we were all aware of this new rule.
I would appreciate any thoughts on the matter. I feel field trips provide kids with hands on experiences they may not have axcess to in a classroom. Now that we are limited to a 60 mile radius our kids will loose a lot of positive fild trip experiences.
