Nicola Alpe: When did being in the PTA become a bad thing?

Being on the PTA is more than just hustling for raffle ticket sales, writes Nicola Alpe. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION:

The end of the school year is fast approaching, although somewhat of a misnomer, with so many kids having been out of school for weeks and no end in sight.

Illustrated by the first day of school versus last day of school pictures that flood our socials, albeit mostly children too young to put up the hefty amounts of surly resistance their elders do, kids go through transformations of the physical, intellectual and emotional through the year.

This year, I too have gone through a transformation. I've gone from parent of a child in Year 1 to full-throttle PTA Chair. Correction. Friends of the School Chair. Somewhere between my primary school graduation and now, things got so dire in the PTA universe that a rebrand was undertaken in an attempt to restore brand equity. I should have known something was afoot when relieved faces appointed me at my very first meeting without checking any credentials. When I excitedly told my mum that my husband isn't the only chairman in the household, she laughed her teacher-representative-of-Friends-of-the-School head off at my naivety.

A friend's laughter echoed my mum's, with her convinced I was now Christina Applegate's character in Bad Moms. I added it to my must-watch list and forgot about it.

On a Sunday morning with little to do I started watching Bad Moms and I saw the similarities. I too have knocked on the driver's window of a car to try and sell a raffle ticket to a parent in the Kiss and Drive lane because they had been studiously avoiding eye contact with me as I made my way down the line, clipboard in one hand and portable Eftpos terminal in the other.

Being involved with the school has given me a completely different perspective on what it takes to make everything work and to keep churning out educated and happy children. With approximately 95 per cent of New Zealand's 766,000+ school-aged children at a state school, education is a significant spend each year for the Government, but it really is a "just enough" system and with the educational side being essentially free to parents, there is little understanding of just how scarce resources actually are. Put simply, for many schools if FOS didn't fundraise and if grants weren't available, children would receive a very stripped back educational experience.

It's a constant battle between funding received and teaching resources required to support learning and development for all students, technology needing to be up to date and enrichments like STEAM labs and such to make education relevant to today's changing requirements. Not to mention the battle of wills between educational philosophies and parents' expectations, those expectations often akin to deliverables of a private school on a public-school budget.

I've had the pleasure of discovering that FOS members are devoted, enthusiastic, talented, great fun to be around and are simply trying to make the school lives of all of our children better. They are also time-poor parents, are juggling work, study and other children, exactly like you. And sometimes they take your refusal to make eye contact with them to heart.

FOS is not all hustling for raffle ticket sales, although that is part of it. It's seeing your kids in their natural habitat as you work the bake sale, getting to know other awesome parents and teachers, and having a fix on what's happening at school. FOS welcomes volunteers with open arms and if you happen to have a chest freezer at home to store excess sausages from the athletics day sausage sizzle, you'll be welcomed with great fanfare.