South Slope Perspective: What’s The Point Of The PTA?
The inaugural South Slope Perspective comes to us from neighbor, parent, and PS 295 PTA member Dan Janzen. If you’d like to share your own South Slope Perspective, including your response to today’s topic, don’t hesitate to contact editor@bklyner.com. South Slope Perspective posts are meant to reflect the opinions of individuals in our community, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of South Slope News.
News flash: Being involved at school won’t help your kids’ grades! That’s the takeaway from a study described in a recent op-ed in the Times. Apparently, all the time you spend baking cupcakes and sitting in PTA meetings and such won’t give your child an edge in the dog-eat-dog global economy. That there might be other reasons to help your school doesn’t seem to have occurred to the researchers — for that, I guess we can blame the reputation of today’s parents as hypercompetitive tiger moms and dads. But at a time when overcrowded, under-resourced schools are struggling to provide students with the education they deserve, the study seems to overlook the biggest reason of all to help our schools: to help our schools.
I’ll confess that I didn’t feel particularly compelled to help at PS 295 when we arrived a few years ago. My motivation was more shame-based. Before we’d reached public school age, my wife and I had always talked about getting involved when the time came, but then she actually followed through by diving in from day one. I hung back at that first PTA meeting in my non-
joiner way, then sheepishly signed up to shelve books in the library and keep an eye on after-school lingerers once a week, the lowest-impact option I could find.
It was on those Thursday afternoons that I started getting a sense of the role parents played at the school. The library itself was created entirely by volunteers, who painted an unclaimed classroom, put up shelves, helped build the collection, and now maintain and support it throughout the year. The parent who led the effort, now our library sciences teacher, has for years done double duty as our resident green queen, leading students around the neighborhood to tend community gardens and learn about the food cycle. When the time came to build frames for gardens in our own courtyard, it was parents who wielded the hammers, and who wrote applications for grants to pay for them. Our weekly farmers market, managed with the help of our third-graders, is another parent-intensive operation.
The same spirit of partnership between staff and parents extends to every aspect of school life. PS 295’s arts and culture orientation is the legacy of the principals who saw it as a way to reach and inspire children of all backgrounds and abilities, but parents sew the costumes for our school play, donate materials for our art classes, and secure the grants to pay for our music program. We meet with local politicians and businesses to ask for their support and sponsorship — in other words, to beg for funding beyond our meager DOE budget so we can buy books and computers and other such luxuries. Every need and challenge that arises is met with a collaborative response by parents and staff, whether through the PTA, the SLT, or the countless informal relationships our moms and dads have with individual teachers and administrators.
More broadly, it’s parent involvement that helps the diverse mix of families at our school become a true community. Every parent at the school is enrolled in the PTA automatically; dues are strictly pay-what-you-can (or nothing at all). Our school is small enough that it’s possible to know nearly everyone else, or at least to feel as if you do, and events throughout the year are designed to build community as much as to raise money. As more people spend more time at the school, they become inspired to offer their own ideas and talents in turn, and even more starts to happen — new after-school opportunities, field trips to local small businesses, fresh blood to work on school projects and events.
Does all this effort pay off? As the study described in the Times makes drearily clear, there’s not a direct relationship between a parent’s hours spent at school and points on their child’s report card. But it’s not about our own kids — it’s about every kid. Until the day when education gets the support it needs, our neighborhood schools will be only as good as we can make them.
And that’s a problem. PS 295 is fortunate to have many parents with flexible schedules, and other Brooklyn PTAs have little difficulty raising ample budgets, but there are many more schools where neither is true. As proud as we are of our work for our school, we’re also aware of criticism that this kind of thing only subsidizes and perpetuates a morally bankrupt educational system that’s willing to starve schools because they know parents will pick up the slack.
Parent involvement can’t stop at our courtyard gate. While we’re trying to raise up our own community, we also need to keep pushing for change system-wide: More funding. More enrichment programs. Better teachers earning better salaries. Less high-stakes testing. The opportunity for every child to learn and grow to their full potential.
At the end of the day, we should be doing this stuff because we want to — not because we have to.
Dan Janzen is a PTA member at PS 295, which is located at 330 18th Street. The school’s weekly farmers market is expected to return on May 22, and its annual Touch-a-Truck event is coming up on May 18.
Top photo via PS 295