Beyond the Bake Sale: Building a New PTA

Francisco Saldana went to a meeting at his daughter’s school just to find out how to help his kids get scholarships. To his surprise, he was greeted by Spanish-speaking school officials who urged him to pitch in more as a parent. Within months, he was co-president of the Santa Ana High PTA.

“They convinced me the best way to help my kids--all our kids--was to be involved,” said Saldana, 45, a manufacturing technician and father of four who came here from Mexico 18 years ago.

That bedrock of school boosterism, the Parent Teacher Assn., is changing.

At the height of its reign as establishment symbol in the 1960s, the PTA was a predominately white institution of at-home mothers whose lifestyles had more than a passing resemblance to Donna Reed’s.

Today, PTAs throughout Southern California are struggling to engage parents who traditionally have not joined or felt welcomed in the school establishment: fathers, working mothers, nonwhites and immigrants.

PTA meetings now are held whenever and wherever parents can get to them--weekends and early mornings, at homes or coffee shops. There are “doughnuts-for-dads” pushes. Church elders and other community leaders have been asked to tap parents for help.

With 6.5 million member families, 1.2 million of those in California, the PTA is America’s oldest and largest child-advocacy organization.

Improving the welfare of children was its founding aim and continues to be so, although the needs of students and their schools have evolved.

Today, well over half of the country’s mothers work outside the home; fathers and grandparents also shoulder child-care duties. Many children are watching themselves. Schools need paint jobs, not just a new set of encyclopedias. In many parts of Southern California, whites are now in the minority. On some campuses, dozens of languages are spoken.

So the PTA has had to redirect its parent education and recruitment strategies.

As the PTA celebrates its 100th year at its national convention in Washington this weekend, many acknowledge its accomplishments and the importance of its role. But there also are some voices of dissent.

Should the PTA be using its energies to feed breakfast to needy school children and, as it does in some parts of Los Angeles, fix their teeth? Should it strictly concentrate on educational reform?

Critics contend that the politics of race and economics have crept into the organization. They point to the California PTA’s opposition to the Proposition 187 anti-immigration measure and the Proposition 174 school voucher initiative. More recent, the San Fernando Valley PTSA district has endorsed in principle breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Local chapters sometimes enter brier patches like the district breakup when they see a direct impact on the schools. But platforms adopted by the National PTA tend to tackle more general concerns.

The PTA’s broadly stated mission remains speaking up for the needs of students, helping parents develop child-rearing skills and encouraging parent and public involvement in schools. Clean drinking water, child labor laws and schooling for black children in the South are among the issues the organization has championed. This weekend, class size and playground safety are on the agenda.

But the PTA cannot act unless parents come to meetings. So getting them to show up, then stay involved, are priorities.

There are more than 26,000 chapters, organized at individual schools as PTAs or PTSAs--for parents, teachers and students. It is an all-volunteer, no-frills operation. When they join, families pay a small fee--typically $5. The national PTA gets $1 of that, giving it $5 million of its $6.4 million in revenues last year; in California, the state organization gets $1.25 per membership.

The PTA doesn’t keep statistics on gender and ethnicity, but officials say one can’t miss the group’s changing look.

“We are trying, at the state level, to change the membership from mostly white, with outreach to ethnically diverse parents but also to men and working mothers,” said Donna Artukovic, president of Orange County’s regional PTA district, the state’s largest with 140,000 members. In Los Angeles County, five PTA districts have a total of 550,000 members.

In the last decade, the white population of California public elementary and secondary schools dropped to 40% from 52%. Today, 21% of students in Los Angeles County are white; in Orange County, the white enrollment has decreased to 46% from 64% in the mid-1980s.

The PTA’s efforts to bridge the language gap and the demand for such services were visible at its state convention, attended by 4,400 members in Anaheim in April. Many workshops--ranging from teaching children to be careful TV watchers to learning parliamentary procedure--were offered with Spanish translation.

“There were so many people wearing headsets it looked like a United Nations meeting,” said Emylou Ballard, director of the California PTA’s outreach commission.

Still, the organization has some catching up to do to meet its diversity goals.

It is a priority of national president-elect, Lois-Jean White, an African American, an activist on the issue for many years. A longtime resident of Knoxville, Tenn., White is a retired symphony orchestra flutist. She and her husband raised three children and have four grandchildren. She helped to create “In Someone Else’s Shoes,” the PTA’s program to help chapter leaders be more successful at recruiting parents of different cultures.

The demographic changes that make recruiting a challenge are “simply a reflection of what is going on in the culture, the community itself, the country,” she said.

“You also have the idea of what the PTA used to be, which was the [family as] Mom, Pop, white, 2.5 kids, a station wagon a dog and a cat. Now we have changes in families, and when I go out to [PTA] groups I tell leaders, never say ‘the average family.’ We have single moms, single dads, grandparents raising children now. There is no average family anymore.”

Drawing immigrant parents into the schools is difficult, says Carmen Devino, director of the Los Angeles Unified’s Asian Pacific American Education Commission. In the Philippines, parents do not involve themselves in campus activities, she says, because they do not want to interfere in what is seen as the teacher’s turf.

“This may be viewed as a lack of interest, when actually the parents only trust that the teachers are doing their job,” said Devino, a former district bilingual coordinator in the San Fernando Valley.

“Many Asian cultures are like that. Plus many parents don’t speak English and they are intimidated by [going to] the school.”

While cultural differences sometimes create barriers to school involvement, PTA organizers recognize that poverty is an even bigger barrier.

“In South-Central and other parts of L.A., you can’t get people to take the leadership to run a PTA,” said Ballard of the California PTA’s outreach commission.

“It’s a matter of poverty,” said Ballard, chairwoman of the PTA’s 10th District Health Center Clinics Commission. For years, she has worked five days a week at the PTA’s Downtown Los Angeles clinics for children of the working poor. “I don’t think these parents love their children any less; they just don’t have the wherewithal.”

PTA-run vision and dental clinics in the San Fernando Valley and downtown Los Angeles are funded by grants and donations and make use of some facilities provided by Los Angeles Unified. They are designed to help the whole family; for instance, parenting videotapes are shown in waiting rooms.

“If you don’t help the parent,” said Ballard, “It can be harder to help the child.”

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A glimpse of the changing PTA profile, and the organization’s hopes for the future can be found in Santa Ana, Orange County’s most urban city. Ninety percent of students in the Santa Ana Unified School District are Latino; seven in 10 have limited English skills.

Simone Eichenberger, a career counselor for the district, is co-president with Saldana of Santa Ana High’s PTA. She is white, speaks only English and has raised two children here. She and other school administrators recruited Saldana to broaden the leadership of the chapter and make it more inviting to the campus’ majority population.

The households of many of the district’s 51,000 students can’t afford to buy the parade of fund-raising goods that some districts sell. Most of the PTA bank accounts here hold only a couple thousand dollars--generated from yard or bake sales and carwashes.

Before Kathi Jo Brunning entered the picture two years ago, the district’s umbrella PTA council had nearly folded. Brunning, 39, is a homemaker who has almost single-handedly revived the PTA in Santa Ana.

Among her supporters: husband Dan, who is PTA president at Willard Intermediate School, where son Cole is a student.

“If both parents are working,” said Dan, a self-employed software programmer, “the school involvement has got to be spread around.”

The PTA, teachers and school officials aggressively seek parent involvement. For more than a decade, meetings have been conducted in English and Spanish and every piece of PTA information sent home with students is bilingual. Appeals for parent support are made via church officials and other community leaders.

Fewer than half--16 of 45--of the schools in the district even have PTAs.

The group has tried to offer programs on topics parents say they want. In late May, 100 people showed up at Santa Ana High to hear Orange County Bar Assn. members discuss parents’ legal responsibilities and liabilities. Seventy-five people attended the Spanish session, 25 the English.

“We have to, as parents, be involved not just in words but in actions,” Saldana told the audience in introducing himself as the co-candidate for PTA president. The Eichenberger-Saldana slate, which was unopposed, won unanimously.

At the meeting, Saldana spoke in Spanish--with English translation. He was met with applause and smiles.

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Efforts to change the PTA have not impressed everyone. Gabriel Medel says he--and parents like him--are fed up.

“We saw that, really, the PTA has become an institution that no longer reflected the needs of the 1990s and the next century,” said Medel, a member of the Los Angeles Unified district’s Bilingual Bicultural Committee and its Mexican American Education Commission.

Five years ago, he launched the nonprofit Parents for Unity, a group of mostly Latino and black parents--3,000 strong--who lobby on educational issues.

The PTA was fine in the 1950s and ‘60s, he said, when Southern California was more “homogenous.” The structure of the organization, he adds, does not afford local chapters freedom to spend their own funds.

His group is critical of the PTA district that encompasses Valley schools for supporting, even conditionally, the proposed break-up of the LAUSD. Backers of creating independent districts--instead of keeping a large single one--are concentrated in the Valley. And, like Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, they say they believe schools would benefit from more local control.

Opposition to the district break-up comes from those who believe Central City schools with larger percentages of poor students would languish for lack of support.

It is an emotionally charged issue--the sort of thing, some contend, the PTA should steer clear from.

Charlene K. Haar, a research associate at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, is a critic of the PTA.

In a stinging article last year in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, Haar contended that the PTA’s child advocacy efforts have focused on social, noneducational issues. And too often, she says, it has become a fund-raising auxiliary for school districts.

“She challenges the focus on the total well-being of kids,” White of the National PTA said. “But that has been our focus from Day One.”

Haar showed up uninvited at the California convention in April. When she was turned away from the sold-out event, she complained that the PTA doesn’t want to hear any dissent.

Said White: “You get to a point where you don’t want someone criticizing you in your [own] living room.”

Fund-raising is conducted to one degree or another by most PTAs. But, its leaders say, the organization tries to ensure that its primary mission is not lost in the rush to prop up sagging school budgets.

At many schools--especially those in affluent areas--booster clubs and foundations separate from PTAs have been formed to raise money for school programs. Those groups have far more flexibility than do local PTAs, which have state and national policies on how money can be spent.

Despite competition from other organizations for parents’ attention and the challenges of connecting with a changing population, the push is on to bring a full-spectrum of parenthood to the PTA.

Ultimately, as a volunteer group, the PTA knows it will be only as productive as its members.

James Hall of Janesville, who is on the California board, travels statewide teaching members leadership skills.

“The PTA needs to change with the times,” he said. “The bottom line is we are trying to help every child have an equal opportunity.”

That’s what Saldana wants, why he became the new co-president at Santa Ana High, where his daughter is a sophomore.

Did he ever dream that he would become a PTA president?

“Never,” he said, laughing. “Never! But I hope to bring in more of our people and show them how important it is for them to be involved.”

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A Century Ago, a Group of Women Set Out to Help Neglected Children

In the 1890s, Alice McLellan Birney, businesswoman and mother of three daughters, dreamed of establishing a National Congress of Mothers to address the needs of children who were abused, neglected or attending substandard schools. She and 17 other women met at the Washington, D.C., home of Phoebe Apperson Hearst--William Randolph’s mother--to plan the first convention, which was held in the nation’s capital in February 1897.

Only 200 were expected to attend, but the convention drew 2,000 women and men from throughout the country. And an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of children was born.

By 1924, the group’s name had become the National Congress of Parents and Teachers. Two years later, a key figure in PTA history emerged: Selena Sloan Butler, founder of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. This group had the same goals as the PTA and worked to improve living conditions for black children in rural areas. It campaigned for clean drinking water, sewage treatment and basic school supplies such as books.

After legal segregation ended in 1954, schools slowly began to integrate. In 1970 the two congresses, which had often worked together, merged.