Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Sunday, April 13, 2008
Parents: Volunteer … or else
(Parent volunteer Charmaine Trayvick with fourth-grader Kevin Russell at the Richard Allen charter school’s Edgemont campus in 2006.)
Sandra Williams, a Cleveland Democrat, wants to help schools with a bill she proposed last week in the Ohio legislature. She wants parents spending more time in their kids’ schools.
So why is the ex-head of the a suburban Cleveland Parent Teacher Organization calling the bill a “stupid idea?”
Here’s what Williams proposed — a $100 fine for any parent who doesn’t log at least 13 volunteer hours each year at their child’s school.
“This is just one of those stupid ideas that surface every now and then,” Elizabeth Papp Taylor, former council president of the Shaker Heights Parent Teacher Organization told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “It will get crushed.”
Williams’ bill says parents who don’t put in the hours and don’t pay the fine will have $100 reduced from any income tax refund they are due to receive.
Taylor and other advocates of volunteering say that it simply is not something that can be mandated. People either feel the call to volunteer or they don’t. To force those who don’t to spend 13 hours in school is a formula for disaster, they say. Some of those folks probably shouldn’t be there if they don’t want to be. They may be more of a burden than a help to the school.
And then there are those who simply cannot be there because of their work schedules. This bill, critics say, is unfair to them.
I am fortunate to have a pretty flexible schedule so I regularly volunteer about an hour a week in my daughter’s first grade class. But my wife works in a school herself and simply is never available during school hours as much as she’d like to volunteer. Now imagine she were a single parent or perhaps had to have a second job to make ends meet. That would seem to make volunteering impossible for her.
Just about everyone would agree that parents spending time in their kids’ schools usually will benefit everyone — the student, the parent and the school. But is this well-meaning bill simply impractical? And if so, is there a substitute approach that might work? Tell us what you think.
(Image credit: Chris Stewart, DDN)
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