Nine Schools Merge Into One

Colvin Run Elementary School’s first year could have been a disaster. Colvin Run was created two years ago from four existing elementary schools and five gifted-and-talented centers in Vienna, Va. When the doors opened at the school, it was the culmination of a long and difficult procedure. “People’s emotions and property values and loyalty come into play when you’re redrawing boundaries,” says Jan Pascoe, the new school’s founding PTO president. “There was a lot of community uproar during the whole process. A lot of parents in this school were on opposite sides of the rail.”

At the time, Pascoe was the president of the parent group at one of the feeder schools. Her group stepped up to try to heal the wounds and bring the new school community together. Seven months before Colvin Run opened, two representatives from each of those existing parent groups formed a parent structure committee (PSC), which began to meet weekly, and the principal traveled to 34 morning and evening get-acquainted coffees hosted by the PSC in homes, recreation halls, and libraries.

In frank discussions, the whole process of getting to know each other was likened to the blending of traditions and cultures in marriage, and parents were asked to view the time before Colvin Run opened like an engagement. By April, despite the fact that everyone was still officially and emotionally tied to their former schools, the engagement was still on, and parents elected a full slate of officers for Colvin Run. “This community really desired to see a full-blown PTO from day one,” says Pascoe. “They felt it would lessen the impact on a lot of parents to come into a structure already well-formed and feel they were not losing out.”

Parents also voted by a decisive margin, three to one, to form a PTO rather than a PTA, which had been the structure at the old schools and which many had expected to continue. “The response was an encouragement that perhaps much of the damage caused in the boundary process could be fixed after all,” wrote Colvin Run parents in their Parent Group of the Year entry.

Easier said than done, though, to meld all those groups, all those separate identities, into a single functioning unit. “The challenge was really neat—to help everybody come together, to present an organization that people could all feel ownership in,” says Pascoe. “That was critical to me. We didn’t want to imitate one PTO or PTA.”

So central was this message of forging a new identity that once they were up and running, the new parent group at Colvin Run outlawed a troublesome, ghost-conjuring phrase: “at my old school,” or AMOS. “One of our favorite catch phrases in our first year is that we were not to say AMOS,” says Pascoe. “AMOS is very often an attempt to manipulate the consensus process, so we tried not to say it.” Instead, the Colvin Run PTO incorporated only successful elements from previous schools’ activities. “We asked not what event worked at another school but what about that event worked,” says Pascoe.

Autumn Fest Sets the Tone

A good example of this approach was the Autumn Fest held that first year. Because the school was new, the PTO decided that building community had to be its first priority. They also wanted to set the right tone by incorporating a service project. And even though the treasury was empty, they did not want to start off by fundraising—despite all the good ideas and vast experience of its parents in this area.

“We decided that if we built around fundraising, then that’s what the PTO would always be about, and eventually we would lose the social element, and then we would eventually lose the fundraising element, too,” says Pascoe.

So families were invited out for field games and a bounce house and storytelling and hay rides and a demonstration of how the local corn mill used to run. Park rangers and fire fighters and fire trucks joined the fun. Parents tried to outdo each other in a spirited chili and salsa cook-off.

For the first year’s service project, held in conjunction with Autumn Fest, participants donated enough canned food to fill two trucks. The second year, with one of their own serving in Iraq, parents prepared 500 packets of school supplies for U.S. soldiers to distribute to Iraqi children. From its inception, Autumn Fest was so successful—1,500 people turned out—that the free hot dogs and cotton candy and popcorn ran short.

Each family, no matter how large, paid a $10 fee to meet expenses, and they were warned ahead of time not to bring their checkbooks. Perhaps the most telling moments were when children proudly led their parents through personal tours of their school. “We never heard anybody complain about being in the school from that day forward,” says Pascoe. “Everybody was finally over the fact of leaving their old schools and had become part of this new school. People love this school now, and they didn’t like anything about it when they were forced into the building.”

As that year and the next one went on, fundraising was incorporated, but building community has remained the focus so that even fundraisers are designed as get-togethers. For instance, a book fair in the school’s library doubled as an ice cream social. A larger book fair—this one held at the local Barnes & Noble store—netted $6,600, but it’s remembered best as a three-day party. Not only parents and children but also teachers, the principal, and the school mascot came. Teachers read in half-hour segments, while parents volunteered for an hour or more. Next time, sixth graders will be invited to read to younger children in order to interest the older kids more in the event.

Another example of a party that happened to raise money was the silent auction, billed as THE (To Help Educate) Bash, a get-together for parents and teachers, the latter receiving free tickets to attend. More than 250 adults showed up, raising $57,000, half of which was used to purchase a mobile computer lab.

Rethinking Room Parents

Partnerships in the community have helped expand the sense of community. Park rangers from nearby Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts come over and give nature talks; children go there for field trips. And the most vivid reminder of the partnership is a mural called “Woodland Serenade,” which every child in the school helped create, now on display at the park.

Colvin Run also prides itself on a supreme effort to involve all parents. The PTO has done this by revamping the role of room parents. Now called lead room parents, these individuals function more as recruiters than anything else. “They make sure every parent comes in to do something,” says Pascoe.

If parents are not directly and individually offered a chance to volunteer in a way that fits their time frame and their interests, says Pascoe, then they just assume that everything is covered and that they’re not needed. So each parent is approached by the lead room parent and asked to commit to something. Anything they do, no matter how small, helps them feel more involved and committed and often leads to their doing something bigger the next time. As a result, not only is Colvin Run averaging 1,025 service hours per month (the equivalent of eight additional staff members) but also, this time is given by more than a core group.

Perhaps the willingness of parents to participate stems from the school’s emphasis on parents as partners in the education of their children. Before the school opened, parents met with administrators, teachers, and counselors to create a character education program called Project: Shape the Future, which focuses on compassion, honesty, respect, and responsibility. What better blueprint could the school—and its parent group—have as they move forward together after such an astonishing beginning?

5 Good Ideas From Colvin Run Elementary PTO

Hot Auction Item
One of the hottest items at last year’s silent auction at Colvin Run Elementary was an evening in the school’s Strategies Lab for a child’s birthday party. The lab, funded by the PTO and staffed by parent volunteers, helps children learn to think outside the box and approach problem-solving in new ways with games and puzzles