Parents at a Texas School District have been fighting to create a PTA in local schools, but the the District has been resisting. It sounds like a very weird situation.
As one parent put it:
“You go to the school, you sign up to do a job, they tell you what to do,” parent Jaim Kaysonphat said. “You have no say, you have no voice.”
You can read about it in two places, and both have television video reports on the controversy:
Del Valle parents keep up fight to form PTA
Del Valle parents protest for PTA
There seems to be something very wrong with this picture….
I’m not entirely familiar with the current orgs in Del Valle, but I think the PTA is doing a good job of positioning this debate as “formal PTA” vs. “no parent involvement” and that’s not actually the choice. More than 75% of schools in the U.S. have no formal PTA, but the vast majority do have a parent organization of some sort (often a PTO). The acronym itself has much less to do with the amount of involvement than what actually happens with the school or the group or the district. Many, many districts have fantastic involvement policies and practices without any formal PTAs.
Tim,
You make an excellent point. The PTA doesn’t have a monopoly on successful parent engagement. There seems to be something more at work in this story, though — but I don’t have the details, either.
Larry