Maybe this year, I'll make the Parent Honor Roll

I’ve decided this is my favorite time of year.

And the reason is simple, though perhaps somewhat pathetic:  we’re three weeks into school and I haven’t messed anything up yet.

Sometimes by the time school gets out in June, I feel like I’m looking back on a ladder of errors and missteps. Arriving late to a parent-teacher conference. Making mistakes on the library volunteer schedule that I’m responsible for organizing every week. Neglecting to refill the kids’ lunch accounts. Overlooking my room-parent duty to supply popsicles for Field Day.

The kids seem to make far fewer mistakes than I do in the course of a school year. But their responsibilities also fall into a narrower scope: get to the bus on time and get homework done. There isn’t a lot of room for error.

I take solace in reminding myself that school isn’t my job, and I make far fewer mistakes at the work for which I’m paid than the unpaid work of overseeing the kids’ schedules and events and my own school-related volunteer commitments. And it also helps to know I’m not the only adult making mistakes. Last year it was the day before Field Day when I suddenly remembered that supplying popsicles was my responsibility. “I would have been the first room parent in the history of the Carlisle Public Schools to forget popsicles on Field Day,” I said to Holly’s homeroom teacher. “Actually, the entire sixth grade teaching team forgot about Popsicles this year. We were relieved that you thought of it at all,” she confessed, making me feel a little better.

But it’s only the third full week of school. We’ve only just begun. No one yet has missed the bus on my watch or left for school without the proper early-dismissal note. So far we have a perfect batting average.

It won’t last, but it’s a good feeling while it does. The kids are always diligent about homework and routines; I’m the one who gets frazzled as the year goes on and makes out the check for intermural sports incorrectly or gets lost on Parents’ Night. So far so good. In another month, I’ll have mistakes to report, but at the moment, I’m passing both seventh grade and tenth grade as a parent.

Maybe this year I’ll even make the Parental Honor Roll, which I’m convinced exists in some secret place and lists all the parents who do everything right.

Or if not this year, maybe next.

A new school means a clean slate -- for me!

I expected that my predominant emotion when I drove up to Concord-Carlisle Regional High School to drop Tim off the first time would be apprehension.

Instead, to my surprise, it was liberation.

I didn’t know this place, true, and that was unnerving. But the up side to being a stranger suddenly became obvious: I didn’t have any pre-existing commitments here. I wouldn’t be likely to recognize people if I were to walk into one of the buildings on campus. I didn’t have any projects under way that needed attention.

All of this may sound more like I’m the one going off to high school rather than Tim, but I’m afraid after nine years as a parent volunteer at my kids’ school, this is how I think. At our local K-8 school, from which Tim graduated last June and Holly just started sixth grade, the campus is full of reminders of tasks I’ve undertaken. Seeing the school library reminds me that I’m in charge of scheduling volunteers once again this year. The lunchroom reminds me that I need to make a vegetarian entrée for next week’s teacher appreciation luncheon. The playground reminds me that it’s time to sign up for recess duty. The familiar faces of staff and other parents remind me of dozens of pre-existing relationships that I try hard to maintain.

At CCHS, I have none of those associations. Last summer, a woman in her eighties whom I was interviewing for a memoir project told me about what it was like when she moved from a suburban community where she’d raised her family to an apartment on Beacon Hill. “It was wonderful,” she said. “I didn’t owe anyone anything. I hadn’t served on their committees and they hadn’t served on mine.”

For some reason, her turn of phrase amused me. It doesn’t exactly have the poetic eloquence of an ancient Native American proverb, but those words were echoing in my mind as I dropped Tim off for school: “I haven’t served on their committees and they haven’t served on mine.” It’s impossible to go through nine years at our local school without taking on myriad tasks and responsibilities as a parent volunteer. Most of the time, they’re a lot of fun; it’s wonderful to have the opportunity to get involved in so many child-related events and projects.

But the high school gives me the irresistible sense of a clean slate. I don’t know the reputations of Tim’s teachers or the distance between his classrooms. I don’t have opinions about his schedule. I don’t know anything about any of it, and best of all, I’m not on any committees yet. I have yet to make a single misstep as a parent here.

The time will come, no doubt: for committee work and for missteps as well as for good memories of presentations, student productions, football games. There are new people to meet and there will eventually be new tasks to undertake; I don’t know of a single school, public or private, that doesn’t draw heavily on parental participation these days. But so far I haven’t taken on a thing. And so instead of the expected feeling of strangeness, I approach this new phase with a sense of relief.

Farewell to another school year

Most years, the last day of school makes me feel nostalgic and sentimental. This year seemed different, though. My two predominant emotions as the kids wrapped up fourth and seventh grade, respectively, with a half-day of school and noon dismissal yesterday, were mild exhaustion and significant relief.

Oh, there was still a pang or two of nostalgia. The end of a year always means changes ahead. Next year they’ll both be on the middle school schedule, which begins and ends one hour earlier than elementary school classes even though all the grades share a campus, so I’ll no longer get to see the littlest kids when I pick Holly up at school, and I’ll no longer have the fun of hanging out with the parents of the younger children as we wait for our kids to be dismissed. And yes, I teared up watching the school buses drive out of the parking lot while all the teachers formed a line waving goodbye, just as I do every year.

But for the most part, I’m less ambivalent than usual about seeing a school year end. Yes, it was a great year for both of the kids: they had excellent teachers, challenging work and good friends. But it also seemed like I had more responsibilities, and I’m waving goodbye to those duties just as cheerfully as the teachers wave goodbye to the buses. Even walking into the main building to pick Holly up yesterday, I found myself thinking “There’s the auditorium where I volunteered for fourth grade band duty. There’s the cafeteria where I chaired the faculty appreciation luncheon. There’s the stage where I spent hours helping out at rehearsals and performances of the seventh grade play. There’s the library where I coordinated volunteer shifts all year.”

Every single one of these duties is something I offered to do. I wouldn’t have had to do any of them; my kids would have been just as welcome and just as well-treated at school had I not appeared on campus once all year. No, these were all my choices. But they added up faster than usual this year, it seemed.

So for the first time in my adult life, I felt a little like a kid again as the last day of school rolled around. Just as when I was a student myself, I was ready for the year to come to a close. I was happy with what had taken place throughout the year – some of which I could take credit for doing and some of which I could only be grateful to be part of – but I was ready for a break from it.

Now, I have that break, and so do my kids: eleven weeks until Labor Day and the start of a new school year. Eleven weeks should be plenty of time to replenish our mental energy and feel a little less worn down by it all. Even to analyze it is somewhat self-indulgent: being a self-employed professional who can participate in lots of volunteer efforts because she has the luxury of working from home and making her own hours is nothing to complain about. And these aren’t complaints: just an exclamation of relief.

School is over for the year. It’s summer, a time for taking a break from it all. Even Holly has that feeling: she announced during her shower last night that in honor of summer vacation, she might stop lining up her shampoo and conditioner bottles in the shower every night after she’s done bathing.

I have no problem with that. If it makes her feel like she’s taking a break from the norm, then she can scatter shampoo bottles as randomly as she wants. We can all use a little break, and now that summer is here, we can all try to find a way to take one.

Classroom time

My sister Sarah recounted the story yesterday of being invited into her 7-year-old’s classroom as a volunteer reader. Her son was so apprehensive about how she would perform that he devised a series of coded hand signals that would signify whether she was reading too fast, too slow, too quiet, too loud, with too much animation, with too little animation, with too much or too little time to look at the pictures, and so forth. “He was so worried that I was going to embarrass him. It’s a far cry from when he was so excited to have me come into the classroom to read that I could barely peel him off of me far enough to see the pages,” she said.

Hearing her talk about it reminded me of the days when I used to help out in my kids’ classrooms a lot – and then less so – and now barely ever. Tim’s kindergarten teacher liked quite a lot of parental help. It was her first year at our school, and she had come from a school system in which every teacher had a classroom aide, which she no longer did. So she was accustomed to having a second adult in the classroom at all times and tried to fill the gap as much as possible with parents.

It was difficult because then, Tim was the way Sarah described Andrew being prior to now: he was always so happy to see me come into the classroom that it was difficult when I had to leave after my prescribed hour or two. Once, in anticipation of a problem, I discussed it with him ahead of time.

“Tim, I can come in and help only if you promise not to cling,” I said that day.

“Mooooommmmm,” he droned with a tinge of contempt, and I was sure he was about to insist he was no clinger. Instead, he said, “Evvvvverryone clings when their mom comes into the classroom.”

Well, that may have been true when he was in kindergarten, but seven years later, things are a lot different. The teachers don’t want or need us around much anymore, and the kids are even less enthusiastic about our presence, though Tim usually endures my rare appearances at middle school without much complaining. Earlier this month, one of his classes decided to have a potluck lunch in honor of Thanksgiving; I had the job of bringing in the pies he’d made earlier in the week. Once there, I was so curious to see how his classmates had changed since I’d last seen them – months or sometimes years earlier – that I could hardly tear myself away, until I committed a key error. “Claire, you’re dressed for the beach!” I said to one girl who was inexplicably wearing a sundress in mid-November. The teacher pressed his lips together; too late I remembered that another teacher had told me years earlier that teachers are forbidden from commenting on kids’ clothing, or at least what girls are wearing. Parents don’t fall under the same restrictions, but I had still overstepped my bounds as a classroom visitor.

In any case, with middle schoolers, the issue of school volunteering evolves into a very different paradigm: where once our presence was needed as reading helpers or project assistants, now we’re called upon most often not by the teachers but by the kids, and it’s for one critical role: to chaperone their dances. Every time a dance comes up on the schedule, the administration threatens that if the kids don’t rummage up the proper number of chaperones, the event will be canceled, so all the kids feel pressured to call in favors. And then, of course, they face the ultimate dilemma of which prospect is worse: having your mother at a school dance or having no school dance at all.

Tim actually doesn’t mind having me chaperone when my turn comes up, which I try to make happen no more than once a year, and Holly is generally neutral about my visits to school. I can’t say I miss the early days when we were urged to come in at least once a week to help out, but I do appreciate the occasional chance to take a peek at what’s going on. Soon enough, the invitations into the classroom will dwindle down to once a year on parents’ day at the most, depending on my kids’ specific educational future. So I’ll continue to enjoy the time I spend at school with my kids. And, just like the teachers, with enough practice I’ll even learn to hold my tongue when their classmates show up in sandals, midwinter.

Volunteer lessons

The kids still have more than a week of school left, counting today, but I feel as if my part of the school year is over, because my last volunteer commitment ended today. As one of two room parents for Holly’s third grade classroom, I presented the teacher with a scrapbook (ably assembled by the other room parent – a fact that should be obvious for anyone who knows me and knows what the results would look like if I were left in charge of assembling a scrapbook) and a gift card redeemable at a number of Boston restaurants.

Both of the kids had a fabulous year at school. In third and sixth grade, respectively, they learned a lot, earned impressive grades, fostered new and existing interests, bonded with teachers, and matured in their relationships with their friends. So we’ll look back on the 2010/11 school year as an overwhelmingly positive experience, for them and for us adults.

But if I am to be honest, I know I didn’t earn nearly as good grades as the kids did, even though my grades are strictly hypothetical. I took on too many of the wrong kind of roles, and in a way it put a little bit of a damper on the year for me. Not enough of a damper to keep me from being happy overall, but just enough to serve as a nearly constant reminder that I’m not always realistic about where my talents lie.

As the school year began, or even earlier, over the summer, I was already experiencing a nagging anxiety that I’d made poor choices in terms of what I’d agreed to do. Along with room parenting, I was once again coordinating the school library volunteer program. I was also heading publicity for the sixth grade Spaghetti Supper and chairing the Walk-to-School Committee, whose flagship event was a walk-to-school day in which we arrange for crossing guards, “walking car pools,” media taking pictures of walkers, and prizes for all. I’d agreed to be one of three Sunday school teachers rotating duties throughout the year and one of three church “greeters” responsible for welcoming people as they arrived on Sunday mornings. I was also leading an ad hoc committee at church intended to evaluate multiple aspects of our performance as a worship community. Late in the winter, I took on the job of heading up publicity for the spring house tour. And when June came, I was in charge of the faculty/staff appreciation luncheon. That event took place just two days ago.

It wasn’t quite the right mix of jobs for me. Even though most of these efforts came with plenty of gratitude and praise from participants and onlookers, I was grudging about several aspects of what I had to do. I’m not a good Sunday school teacher for a number of reasons. I should have recruited more help for the two publicity committees I served on. The walk-to-school day was successful but culminated with the committee essentially dissolving because we felt that our mission – to get more school-aged children to walk or bike to school, and to ensure they could do so safely -- was unworkable. Tuesday’s faculty/staff luncheon worked out well, but it would have been even better if I hadn’t been quite so hesitant in going after contributions.

So I’m ending the school year feeling a little bit worn out: not resentful of all the things I was asked to do but doubtful of my own judgment. It just seems that I need a better perspective on where my strengths lie.

Of course, some of my volunteer responsibilities worked out well. Although Holly’s teacher ribbed me at times for being such a delegator, always sending out emails to find chaperones for field trips and never actually attending a field trip myself, every classroom need was met. The library program ran smoothly, with volunteers happily covering the shifts they’d asked for. The church evaluation committee delivered a well-received report to the congregation.

But I still think there are lessons to be learned. I still think at some point I need to figure out how to be more honest with myself about what I can reasonably do and which efforts I’d be better off assisting someone else with rather than heading up myself.

And that’s fine, because I’ll have plenty of opportunities to improve on my volunteer skills. Yesterday, I agreed to coordinate next spring’s faculty/staff luncheon; while it’s still all fresh in my mind, I want to think about how I can make it better. I’ll do the library volunteer scheduling again in the upcoming school year, and I’ve expressed my willingness to be a room parent again if needed.

Plus there are always new challenges. Tonight there’s a meeting of the sixth grade parents to discuss volunteer jobs for the class play. I’m trying to think about whether something different would be a good change for me: assisting rather than leading a committee, perhaps, or doing something not as closely aligned with my professional roles as publicity.

Since there’s no end of requests, there’s no end of chances for improvement. This year was a learning experience. Yes, I made some mistakes in what I agreed to take on. But I learned from them. Next year I’ll try to put experience into action.

Lunch/recess duty on a rainy Tuesday

One could argue that my having volunteer lunch/recess duty for both the second grade and fifth grade yesterday smacked of divine justice. After all, what I did back in September was subversive. Each parent who is available to volunteer for lunch/recess duty is urged to sign up for one regularly recurring day a month: say, first Tuesdays or fourth Fridays or whatever. Parents like me, who would rather have gum surgery than be lunch/recess volunteers but still believe deep in their hearts that school volunteering is the price we pay for the luxury of being self-employed and working from home, sign up first – and grab the coveted fifth days. The fifth Monday, the fifth Tuesday, and so on. Most months, there’s only four of each day; fifths of each one come along only a few times a year, and some of those months are bound to be during vacations. So we grab the fifths and consider our responsibilities fulfilled.

Rather like gum surgery, when I noted fifth Tuesday lunch coverage in my appointment book last fall, March seemed as far off as the next millennium. Eventually, though, it was time to pay the piper. And it served me right for my sneakiness that my day to supervise lunch and recess along with a paid aide and a few other volunteers fell on Day 2 of a massive three-day rainstorm at the end of the rainiest March in Massachusetts history. Little kids cooped up for lunch and indoor recess when it’s been pouring for days on end? Some might say I got just what I deserved.

Except I had a pretty good time. It turns out when you work by yourself six hours a day, immersing yourself in elementary school clamor for two hours is a fine diversion. Normally I dread the lunchroom. Our school cafeteria, though well-lit, spacious and relatively clean, always puts me in mind of that urban myth that pervades at universities all over the country about architects who designed the library without taking into account the weight of the books, so the structure is supposedly sinking into the ground by several inches a year. I’m convinced that the team who designed and built our school cafeteria neglected to think about the noise generated by 200 kids eating lunch together at once. The acoustics are deadly; the volume at times barrier-breaking.

But yesterday it didn’t seem so bad, and neither did the indoor recesses I supervised, one in the fifth grade classroom and one with the second graders. When I arrived in the fifth grade room, the teacher had just started showing an animated film about the build-up to the American Revolution. I was amused at how the kids seemed glued to the screen. Maybe it was the Disney-ish visuals, but they appeared compelled by the movie. And they knew their history, too. When a slim African-American woman was asked who she was and her companion replied tartly, “Only the first-ever African-American to publish a volume of poetry!” at least half the kids called out, “Phillis Wheatley!” When Benjamin Franklin’s apprentice described how his mentor’s lightning rod had saved his life during a storm, the audience cheered.

The children had use of two connected classrooms; those who were not watching the film were in other room talking, reading or playing games. I dropped in there to see what was going on and found my son and three other boys batting a beanbag ball back and forth with their hands. “Hi, Nancy!” yelled one of Tim’s best friends, dispensing immediately with the typical classroom formalities of Mr. and Mrs. I was pleasantly surprised to get such a warm welcome.

The second graders were a little less resourceful in their use of indoor recess, but they won me over anyway by making me feel useful. Two boys were tossing a nerf football when it arced up to a high shelf and got stuck behind a folded blanket. They asked me to get it down. Only in a roomful of second graders do I have the honor of being the tallest person in the room, but I felt terribly useful as I climbed onto the chair one of them brought me and fumbled around until my fingers located the nerf ball. They cheered when I tossed it down. And that wasn’t the end of my usefulness. I used my well-honed mediation skills to head off an imminent fist fight over Legos (“The fact is, Jeff, even if you think the red one was in your pile and Ryan says it was in his, there’s five hundred others just like it in this bin”) and solved another child’s problem by proving myself able to sound out the word toboggan. A useful lesson for me: If you want to feel clever, strong, physically capable and generally important, go spend an hour with a classroom full of second graders.

Plus I got presents. While the boys played with Legos and nerf footballs, the girls were coloring. And to my great surprise, many of them gave me artwork to take home. One made a flowered bookmark for me. Another made a picture of a pink cat, and a third drew a sketch of herself throwing up. As I mentioned, it was pouring outside, so I can’t say any of those gifts survived beyond the school parking lot, but I was delighted with my haul.

So maybe next year I’ll be more generous and sign up for a real commitment, not the Cheater’s Fifths as I like to think of those fifth days. But maybe I won’t. I wouldn’t want the novelty to wear off. And once the kids grow tall enough to reach their own nerf balls down from the upper shelf, I might find myself far less in demand during indoor recess.

School volunteers: what if one day no one raises their hand?

The Boston Globe ran a story earlier this week about parents who feel burned out with volunteer requests from their kids’ schools. I don’t personally feel burned out; I feel pretty well-balanced, but that’s because I’ve figured out (with five years of experience in the public school already behind me) exactly what the right amount of volunteer work is for me to take on.

I do sometimes feel like the system is a house of cards, though. And it makes me a little nervous, because I worry that if some of the parents who do far more than I do become overwhelmed, major systems could fail. I so appreciate their work, and I so understand the need for it – in many cases, they are taking on work as volunteers that the school can’t currently pay for, and I certainly can’t afford to see my taxes go up – but I worry sometimes that too much is resting on the shoulders of the volunteer network. What happens when people stop stepping to the plate in such high numbers? Many parents in Carlisle are either self-employed or stay-at-home moms and dads, but some have been laid off from full-time jobs. If unemployment gradually subsides in this region and more people go back to work, will there be fewer volunteers available for daytime needs?

Sometimes when I look at the list of names managing any one volunteer project at our school, I’m a little bit astonished at the acumen we’ve managed to gather. On the one hand, I’m impressed and grateful that the president of our PTA is a Princeton graduate with a master’s degree in teaching, the head of the School Building Committee is a highly credentialed civil engineer, a handful of parents who majored in drama in college are willing to direct and produce the seventh grade play, the head of the technology committee has successfully run several of his own start-ups, and we have at least three MBAs from top universities on our fundraising committee. On the other hand, it makes me feel both worried and guilty for those towns that don’t have this kind of brainpower or professional expertise among their parent body. The head of the School Building Committee, for example, might as well be doing a full-time job for the school for all the work he puts in – yet after he meets with the architects, designers, engineers and school administration almost daily, he goes off to his real job. What happens in towns that don’t have people with his professional talents, his flexibility in the workday, and his willingness to serve in this capacity?

What about the group I worked with last year on the fundraising auction, many of whom spent three months on tasks ranging from soliciting donations for auction items to selecting a venue for the semi-formal event to drafting the auction booklet to managing the software with which we run the financial side of the auction? Well, we were in luck, in the latter case: a new mother in town happens to have worked for several years for the public TV station that runs one of the biggest fundraising auctions in the country. She doesn’t even have a child at our school yet; her daughter was only three at the time, but she was still willing to help out. I sat next to her for most of the event as she ran spreadsheets and generated reports, and having seen it up close, I certainly can’t imagine running an event like that without her.

For myself, I’ve found a comfortable balance at the school. I sign up every year to be a room parent in one of my children’s classes, a job that become easier by about tenfold once the school eliminated refreshments from classroom celebrations. Mostly, as room parent, I send out e-mails from the PTA, and occasionally recruit chaperones for field trips or supply Popsicles for games day in June. Along with a friend, I also coordinate the school library volunteer program. Luckily for us, there are many parents who enjoy doing a weekly or bi-weekly library shift, so we’ve managed to cover the gap left when the library assistant position was eliminated by budget cuts two years ago. Once a month I cover recess/lunch duty for my daughter’s grade; I know I should sign up to do it more often, since coverage at recess is often insufficient and parts of the playground sometimes have to be closed to the children due to inadequate supervision.

I’m happy with what I do, but I’m intimidated by the thought that many parents do far more, and without them, major events would fail to happen. But I’m also frequently reminded of what a privilege it is to be welcomed at the school and to be included so warmly in the school community. Last week, I went up to do my weekly hour at the library. A little boy was arriving to school late, and his teacher, who knows me, asked me to bring him to the main office so that she could walk her students over to music class. It was heartwarming to feel so trusted. The office staff greeted the child kindly and showed him where to sign in as a late arrival. I signed myself in and then headed down the hall of the middle school to get to the library. It was between classes; kids were calling to each other, laughing, flirting, and generally knocking along the way middle schoolers do. I spotted my sister’s eighth grade math teacher, still in the same eighth grade room, still looking as enthusiastic about math as he did nearly 30 years ago. I waved to Tim’s teacher from last fall, back from maternity leave and surrounded once again by fourth graders.

It’s true that I don’t know how the school would manage without us volunteers, but it’s also a joy to be part of that system.