Category Archives: Volunteer Management

It’s back to normal  and back to the old grindstone after Winter Break! Let’s start the New Year by discussing one of the most annoying yet most tasks for a parent group: creating a student directory.

When my children attended a small co-op nursery school, everybody knew each other. Everyone received a tidy list with names, phone numbers, and email addresses. Each family even had its own mailbox at school. Every family used email every day. Communication was easy.

The transition to our local public elementary came as a bit of shock. Birthday parties were the first casualty. If my son wanted to invite friends from his kindergarten class, I sent him to school with paper invitations with our email and phone numbers, then hoped for the best. It felt like sending mail into a black hole. It was not easy to get to know his new friends and their families, and it took a long time to feel a sense of community in our new school. The simple fact of not having contact information or names felt like a real barrier.

To me, one of our jobs as a parent organization is building community…and that starts with information. I have been on a personal quest for our PTA to create a school-wide student directory for several years, with only limited success. For many schools, a student directory is something to take for granted. Obstacles that I’ve faced:

School privacy and family concerns.

Clearly, no one wants a child’s information published without their parents’ permission. Privacy policy varies from school to school, school system to school system. Some schools will release information to parent groups, after giving parents a chance to opt-out. (For an example, see the Montgomery County page on Student Privacy Policy.) On top of that, individual schools (especially Title One) schools have additional privacy concerns and are reluctant to release information. Your administration may simply not be comfortable releasing info to you.

For our school, that meant that our directory had to be completely opt-in: parents actively had to sign up and fill in a form (either paper or online). That eliminated the privacy concern, but meant less participation. That’s just human nature. If you present people with a form with their name and information already printed and give them a chance to sign off, they will be much more likely to check it off and send it in than if you ask them to entirely enter information from scratch.

Add to that the privacy concerns of parents. I don’t blame parents who don’t want to put their family’s info out there. And yet it’s frustrating. To address this, we’ve made the directory only available to those who decided to put their information in it. When an advertiser wanted a copy, we had to turn them down – the last thing we need is somebody using our directory as a marketing tool. We also put a big disclaimer in our directory making it explicitly clear that the information the student directory is NOT to be used for solicitation purposes. Sample wording:

The information in this directory is for the sole use of [your school here] families and may not be used for solicitation purposes of any kind.

You may have to convince families (and administration) about the benefits of a directory if you’ve never had one. Talking points:

• Get to know your neighbors.
• Get to know your child’s friends. Set up play dates and have better luck sending out those stupid birthday invitations!
• Get help! Was your kid sick and needs to make up an assignment? Do you want to discuss something with other parents? Do you want to set up a car pool? Can’t do any of that without phone numbers and email.

Printing costs.

Whether you produce a bound directory or put together a stapled photocopy, paper and printing is shockingly expensive. Even if your school policy lets your volunteer group use the school photocopier, they may balk at 500 directories. What are some other solutions?

• Ads. We’ve tried to sell ads to sponsor printing costs and had luck with local small business and businesses owned or run by student families. Real estate agents, accountants, doctors, and your local franchise restaurants and stores are good choices. Again, though, keep privacy in mind. Don’t give out copies of the directory to advertisers, and make that policy clear from the beginning to avoid any confusion or bad feeling.
• Some schools sell “personals” to families and students, sort of like the old-fashioned school yearbook used to.
• Charge for paper copies.
• And of course, the obvious solution:  limit the number of paper copies and go electronic. This can be as simple as creating a PDF and emailing it to families, or using an online method. More on that below.

It’s a lot of work.

Yep. It’s a big task for parent volunteers to accomplish in their spare time. But there are way to make it less painful.

Our current approach to creating a student directory is limiting it to PTA members, making it an incentive to join, and sending out paper copies for a small charge. That reduces the number of paper copies and addresses privacy concerns. The downside: it’s not a comprehensive directory of all students. But as the proverb says, don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. When making a student directory, you need to choose the best, most practical option for your school community, even if it’s not ideal.

A variety of companies and out there offer products and services aimed at PTAs and PTOs, many specifically for creating directories and managing member and volunteer information. Over the next few weeks I’ll be discussing the options I’ve found out there, plus I’ll talk about the nitty-gritty of creating a directory on your own using Word and Excel.

Happy New Year!