Monday Musings - PTAhhhhhh

I am member of my daughters School Council, I am in fact the Secretary. My job being to take all the minutes and distribute them and check and sort the mail. We have a meeting tonight, in an hour in fact. The girls are at Yia Yia's house so I am supposed to be eating dinner (bowl of cereal so far) and getting ready for the meeting. I am getting ready and normally while I wouldn't say I look forward to these meetings I usually don't mind going. The members are all nice people and the teachers too, the Principal is fine too. And, even if they weren't I'd never tell, I have discovered I have a real fear of Principal's in general...even if they are not mine. Ours is rather dour and not much fun and tries very hard to make all the meetings morose and even though I am all grown-up there is the way this person looks at me that makes me all want to blurt out, "I am the one who pulled the alarm!"

I got involved when Papoosie Girl was in JK, keener that I am. I wanted to help! Be involved and make a difference! The truth is we have a school population of just over 400 kids and we have a bare bones Council with five of us in positions and about four more who attend fairly regularly and help when there are events. As part of the mandate there are also two teachers who attend and are members and the Principal, there is a binder about 12 inches thick with all the rules and guidelines the Council must follow. The Board takes this very seriously, no mocking allowed at all. Not even if your comments are the tiniest bit funny.

I have no more time to give than anyone else, but I feel very strongly that in order to have a say you have to be willing to put in a bit of effort. Several of my friends are on Councils that are vibrant there are actually so many people who want positions they vote them in, and they make a huge impact on the school and greater community. While our Council is small we are mighty and we make our fund-raising dollars stretch to include, community outreach, charities here and elsewhere, relief for disasters, the school library, new AV equipment for the gym, supply teachers so the teacher/coaches can accompany their teams, graduation, confirmation and the list goes on.

So why I am I blogging with an obvious point I need to make? One of the members of Council is not attending because their son has his first soccer game tonight and they have not forwarded the pertinent information we need to make this meeting matter. We have known about the meeting for weeks so in my opinion there is no excuse. We all make an effort to attend the meetings and be prepared, how rude to waste our time when we can't make any decisions tonight based on one person's thoughtlessness.

I think I am done now. I am sure many of you have much worse PTA stories to tell. I just get very annoyed when everyone is making a concerted effort to attend these meetings and a few key players are not holding up their end of the deal.

I am off now to eat my real dinner, yummy chicken drumsticks all sticky and gooey from the oven with some rice. Yum. The cereal was my appetizer because I just could not wait a single second longer to eat, I get like that when I am hungry - all shaky and crazy and need to eat NOW.

Off to school now for the meeting, my head is already running several nicer versions of the above to share with the Council, we all need to play nice in the sandbox.