Your story of burnout and lack of parent involvement is far too common around the country. Myself and a friend, who are both parent group "groupies," as we call ourselves, are like you guys; we never say no, we do it all, every teacher in the school knows us, etc.
My friend and I knew that if we could find a way to connect with more parents to get them involved, it would take much of the burden off a few who were doing it all.
We created a program called Three for Me, it's free, and it engages EVERY PARENT. Paents are asked to sign a promise card to volunteer three hours for the ENTIRE school year. Three doesn't sound like a lot, or enough? Many think that, but when you take a couple of hundred parents who never volunteer and they give three hours, it's tremendous. We discovered that the average parent that signed a promise card ended up volunteering almost 15 hours.
The promise, gave them a reason to volunteer and opened the door at the school to them. Most parents don't volunteer because of the unknown, they don't feel welcome, have had bad experiences with school, or their schedule is just too full to add another THING. But, when we kicked off our newly created program three years ago, it was a hit and we went from 4,000 hours of volunteerism in one year at a school to more than 8,100 hours. It grew again our second year by another 30%, and still now we are up 20%. Most every parent volunteers now, and our numbers keep rising.
With the principal, office staff and teacher support, our school become a welcoming school starting at the front door and in office. We got mroe organized in dealing with parent volunteers and reached out to them to do things from home, at school, in the evenings, and to do things with their child that would help that child educationally. We made sure that parents felt good about being involved and were thanked. Parents started to feel important and valued.
Aside from volunteer hours increasing, teachers felt more supported at school, and the best thing happened: test scores increased three years in a row at our school. We see this happening around the country,too, from schools that have Three for Me in place. We have more than 3,000,000 parents around the country and 8,000 schools doing Three for Me now. Check it out at
www.three4me.com. It's free, you can download what you need, print it and go.
We presented Three for Me at two of the PTO Today Parent Conferences last year in Chicago and Nashville, many of those attendees started Three for Me and are having great success. We really like the PTO Software that helps parent groups coordinate volunteers. Coordinating and tracking volunteer hours is a key piece to making sure that your parent group group keeps its own promise, "to plug-in every parent that signs a promise card into an activity or event that best suits that parent."
Three for Me works, check it out.
