On the first day of school last year, Renton mom Grace Lupercio attended a coffee and doughnut event for parents, hosted by the school’s Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). The purpose of the event was to connect families and welcome them to the school community.
While the PTA leaders were nice, Lupercio felt like an outsider.
“You could see that everybody knew each other because they were all in the [same] neighborhood,” says Lupercio, who lives outside of the immediate neighborhood where the school is located. “Their kids went to preschool together and did sports together. It felt kind of like a clique.”
Is the school’s PTA inviting to all?
A school’s PTA should help parents get plugged into their school’s social and volunteer lifeline, but it isn’t always the most inviting environment. Unfortunately, PTA engagement at many schools is prescriptive, unintentionally excluding families with cultural, social, and academic backgrounds that don’t fit neatly into an organizational structure that adheres to the norms and values of the dominant white culture.
“The majority of the people on the PTA committee are Caucasian, and that can be a little intimidating, so [parents who don’t speak English] feel like they probably don’t have a voice,” says Lupercio, whose children attend a school where Hispanic/Latino students compose 24% of the student body and white students a total 31.4%. She remembers her own mom being active in the PTA alongside other Spanish-speaking moms at Lupercio’s predominantly Hispanic elementary school.
A time of challenge for Seatle PTA/PTSAs
Especially in Seattle, PTAs and PTSAs are in the midst of turmoil as Seattle Public Schools prepare to make decisions–including potential school closures–that will impact all students.
During the summer, the Seattle Council PTSA, which advocates for 87 local PTAs, experienced a surprise when a slate of unexpected candidates challenged four incumbent council seats. School safety concerns, ongoing budget challenges, and concerns about diversity were all reasons for the seat challenges. The four incumbents narrowly kept their seats.
A Closer Look at the PTA
How can PTAs be more inclusive and create an inclusive school community that not only welcomes all families but ensures their voices are valued?
First, it helps to understand a little history: The National PTA was created more than 125 years ago, in 1897, to advocate for students’ needs at legislative and other policymaking levels. Each school’s PTA falls under a regional branch, which reports up to state-level PTAs, which all sit under the national PTA.
State and national PTAs still prioritize legislative advocacy and try to get parents engaged in it, but at the school level, that aspect of the PTA mission is often overshadowed by a reputation as a fundraising entity. Because schools are often underfunded, PTA-raised funds pay for field trips, assemblies, school supplies, technology upgrades, enrichment activities, and sometimes even salaries.
Parents who volunteer for their school’s PTA admit the environment can feel exclusive, with limited representation of student demographics. Vivian van Gelder, Director of Policy and Research for Southeast Seattle Education Coalition (SESEC), an organization dedicated to improving education for children, speculates that the discomfort many parents feel around the PTA structure may be its unintentional alignment with “white supremacy culture,” reflected in the classic corporate structure often used in PTA meetings.
Does Robert’s Rules work for all?
In her popular article about white supremacy culture, educator Tema Okun describes an emphasis on quantity over quality, urgency, and a belief in one right way of operating as examples of a traditional, white, privileged approach to organization and action.
In a PTA meeting, this might look using Robert’s Rules of Order, a set of formal procedures used to conduct orderly meetings. At Lupercio’s children’s school, meetings open with the pledge of allegiance followed by reports from committee chairs and updates from the school principal.
When PTAs operate according to these characteristics, “they will feel more welcoming to anyone who’s internalized or feels at home in that culture,” says van Gelder, who has served in multiple PTA groups. By way of example, she says that the fundraising aspect of the PTA attracts people with nonprofit or corporate experience and conversely excludes people from the working class who are trying to support their own families, much less raise money for the schools/
Creating a Space for All Families
Erin Okuno, a Seattle public school parent and racial equity consultant, says there are several ways school-based membership organizations like the PTA can ensure all parents — regardless of fundraising abilities — feel welcome to show up and get involved. Here are a few:
- Build relationships. Active PTA members can help break down barriers by simply introducing themselves to other parents. Okuno says being personally invited to an event increases the chance that parents will engage. Lupercio got more involved at school because another mom personally invited her to volunteer together. Since then, Lupercio has invited other moms who previously were not involved to volunteer with her.
- Create connections during meetings, particularly at the beginning and the end. “At PTA meetings, never start with business,” Okuno says. “Use the time together to create ritual and belonging. Have an icebreaker question where people can talk to a new person for a few minutes. As an introvert, I hate this, but as a facilitator it is important to get people into a space of being slightly uncomfortable so they can relate to others.”
- PTA leaders need to know their school’s demographics. Translate all invitations to meetings into languages spoken in the community. Offer interpreters for non-English speakers and provide childcare and meals.
- Use diverse communication platforms like WeChat and WhatsApp that different language-based communities use, and recruit a bilingual parent to serve as a liaison between the parents and the PTA.
- Pay attention to disability access, including physical accommodations, captioning services for online meetings, and verbal descriptions of visual aids.
- Prioritize racial equity by adopting the Color Brave Space meeting agreements, a set of norms that center the experiences and voices of people of color during meetings. These include building trust, creating space for multiple norms and truths, and examining racially biased systems, all of which “creates the expectation that we are going to acknowledge race, we are going to acknowledge power dynamics, and it also gives people permission to call it out a little bit easier,” Okuno says.
Van Gelder is impressed with one school in South Seattle: Their PTA has replaced its monthly meetings with community dinners, where PTA business is just one agenda item. Rather than conducting transactional stand-alone meetings, the PTA demonstrated their desire to build culturally responsive relationships — recognizing the importance of food and children as connection points — with families in the wider community, says van Gelder.
“Every family needs to feel like they matter … It’s more work, but schools need to do active outreach to less-heard families,” van Gelder says. “The benefits for students, staff, and families can be enormous.”
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