PTA Meeting Metrics

The Parent Teacher Association, or PTA, is one of the longest active organizations designed to ensure a quality student life. Some form of the PTA has been around since the late 1800's, and while membership into the PTA has dropped considerably in recent years, it is estimated that as many as 5 million parents and teachers are still active in PTA life, with millions more affiliated with similar but not technically PTA groups. While the PTA is technically dedicated to parental participation, they're also designed to make sure that the school itself is actively being run in a way that is best for students.

Both parents and teachers see two sides of a child's life. Parents see how the child does at home with their homework, happiness, and general personality. Teachers see how a student does in the classroom.

Both of these roles are crucial in recognizing what's best for the child.

One of the problems with most PTA meetings, however, is that despite all of the rules and meeting strategies, there are still plenty of ways to improve organization. The typical PTA comes up with several random ideas to discuss on the agenda. While some of these ideas have outside sources, many of the contributions come from a select few people.

Even when put to a vote, these organizations often do so in a way that is not ideal for generating valuable feedback and honest results. Many of them ask questions in public, and not everyone on the PTA is going to stand up for what they believe in or act.

PTA meetings are, in many ways, exactly like most types of survey research or polling. You ask questions to the groups, discuss strategies, and ultimately vote on what you think is best.

But the problem is that everything is done in public, and in a way where each person doesn't receive equal amounts of time to discuss their thoughts or beliefs. You need everyone in a PTA group to be able to speak their mind, provide their opinion, and cast their votes. You need them all to do so without fear of being judged or concern over the validity of their opinion.

You simply can't do that when you're running these meetings in public in a way that doesn't involve every single person in the PTA. You need people to act and vote based on what they think is best, not what they're willing to do when other people's eyes are on them. Survey software can help you tackle this issue.

Here are several of the ways that utilizing this software can vastly improve the success of the PTA and the success of your children: Run a survey before each meeting. In the survey, ask qualitative and quantitative questions about what should be on the agenda. Discuss all sorts of topics, leave room for further discussion, and view everyone's answer anonymously.

You may even want to poll those not in the PTA to see if they have anything they feel needs to be discussed, because great ideas can come from any source – not just those that have decided to play a role in PTA meetings. At the meeting, start discussing the topics that you discovered during your initial survey. Don’t vote right there.

Let everyone that wants to speak their piece speak. Not everyone will, but that's not necessarily something that you can control. Don't worry about voting on these topics yet, but you can decide to let people take notes if they need to about each topic.

Once the meeting is over, send a survey to each person at the PTA meeting with the questions that were brought up for discussion, allowing them to vote on each one. This way they can vote anonymously without being judged by others. Make sure that they know the issue is anonymous.

Once completed, you can publish the results online. The Survey Methods software has a very helpful online feature that will show people the results of the survey via online link. You can also discuss the results at the next meeting.

While this may seem like a lot of extra work, the reality is that it will actually save a considerable amount of time and be much more fair to voters. Meetings themselves will become far more organized and to the point. Voting will take place behind closed doors (allowing you to cut voting time from the meeting and ensure that voting is not public in a way that could influence the votes of others).

Right now, the goal of your PTA meetings is to make sure that the students have the best possible education available. Your organization needs to maximize the way it addresses and responds to needs in order for that to be possible. Survey tools can help you with this.

Give us a call today to find out more.