PTSA Council Parent Education Chair
Getting Set Up

Preparation:   It is important to familiarize your self with the following.  You want to be able to understand where you can find things and how the program works.  Below you will find more details about each of these.

§         Parent Ed Chair Notebook

§         Parent Ed Chair CD- This has Parent Ed Team List, how to information, samples (i.e. Flyers, articles), originals for the training and seminar handouts, and historical information (i.e. past Parent Ed Listings of seminars, etc)

§         Email Address and Group Distribution Lists

§         Parent Ed and Special Service Rep List (includes contact inform etc)         

§         PTSA Council Website –Parent Seminars section

§         State PTSA Website: (being created Parent Seminar Speaker resource list)

Getting Started- What to do:

Parent Ed Chair Notebook:

Look thru and familiarize with what is there.  The first part #1-9 is the working part of your binder that most of which changes year to year.  The second part of your binder #6, and 10-13 is informational to doing your job and does not change year to year.  The second part of the binder #5- are also found on the Council Website under Parent Seminars-Parent Ed Rep Information.

1. Parent Ed & Special Service Rep List: Contact information for your team
2. Council Directory: Contact information for the PTSAs you serve.
3. ISD Staff Directory: Print this out from the ISD website so you will have with you the contacts, phone numbers for your ISD contacts and principals etc.
4. Other resources: Names and contact information for other Resources such as SEA Board Parent Ed Contact,
5. Council Schedule of dates: Council Presidents handout also on the Council Website
6. Parent Ed Chair Planner: This includes your “Annual planner” which lists the basic plan for the year, but is not all inclusive and does not change year to year.  You schedule the actual dates for the planner and any unforeseen activities.
7. Current Years Plans: This would include the current plans for this year. Goals, seminars planned,  etc.  The target is to have at least preliminary plans for the current year by the previous Ap-Ju time period to help get seminars planned and happening by October. Include known seminars by other groups including ISD, SADFAC, Friends of Youth, other District PTSAs, etc.
8. Safe and Drug Free Advisory Committee: includes a list of current members, their plans for the year, and a copy of the current Healthy Youth Surveys.  This information will help you plan and/or guide Parent Ed Reps on seminar topics (don’t want to duplicate).  You would get it from whoever is assigned to that committee to represent the PTSA Parent Ed group this year.
9. Parent Ed Budget:  Current years budget that you are responsible for managing. You submit expense requests to the Council Treasurer to use that budget.  This includes reimburse parent ed reps for Transition Seminar costs, paying speakers for council hosted programs etc.
10. Parent Ed Program Section:  Read this thoroughly. This explains the Issaquah PTSA program and includes a brief history of why it got started.  This section is also used as the handout for training Parent Ed Reps. A MS Word copy of it is on the Parent Ed Chair CD.
11. Special Services Program:  Read thoroughly especially the mission and goals for this sub-group of Parent Ed.
12. Transition Seminars:  These are specially developed annual seminars the Parent Ed Council Hosts/Pays for (The Parent Ed Rep team helps with tasks).  Each seminar has a MS Word File folder that has all the information on how to host the seminar that can be sent to the Parent Ed reps helping to host the seminar.  Transitions seminars are Kindergarten Transitions, 5th Grade Transitions and hopefully eventually Transitioning into 9th grade/High School, and Transitioning out of High School.
13. Group Distribution and Resource Lists:  This is a list of the different people that should be included in an email group distribution list, critical contacts for the Parent Ed position etc.

Parent Ed Chair CD: 

This CD has all of the fixed portions of the Parent Ed Binder in MS Word Documents.  In addition it has the Parent Ed Team List which is in MS Excel (although a PDF or word document format should be used when distributing to the team), how to information, samples (i.e. Flyers, articles), originals for the training and seminar handouts, and historical information (i.e. past Parent Ed Listings of seminars, etc).  The CD is divided into folders to help make it easier to use.

Email: Email Address and Group Distribution Lists:

This position is highly dependent on email.  The following will help make   your job easier and more successful

1.      Having a high speed email will reduce your time and make life easier for you. 

2.      Having email management software will help you stay organized and reduce your time spent on this work.  (example MS Outlook)

3.      EMAIL Addresses

Your Address:  It is STRONGLY recommended that you have a special email address for          your Parent Ed Chair role.  This is for the protection of your home email account- (your emails       will be sent out to a distribution area).  It also makes it easier for those receiving your emails to       recognize that they are not SPAM. The traditional email address used is:

yourfirstnameparentedptsa@_________

Address Lists: By getting the previous years Chair to give you their email address lists you do     not have to type them from scratch.  Just update those that are changing. By including  the School name as the Business name and persons position as their job title  you will easily be able to search for a contact within email also it will make it easier to make changes as people change positions.  You would simply change the name and address while maintaining the business and job title.  This makes updating and setting up group distribution lists easy.

4.      Managing Email:  It is easiest if you use file folders to manage your email.  Samples of an email file folder set up in on the Parent Ed Chair CD in the “Email” folder.  Try to respond to emails quickly and then delete them.  Only keep those that are on a specific ongoing project or topic that have important information included.

                  TIPS:

                  Keep emails brief and include all the details needed on a topic to reduce back and forth questions. 

                  Double check before you send that you have any attachments needed included.

                  Use specific information on your subject line:

                              Ex: Parent Ed Action Request – meeting 3/16/06

                                     Parent Ed Seminar Opportunity-pass the word

Parent Ed and Special Service Rep List This is a yearly list that includes the name and contact information for your entire parent ed team.  Each school/PTSA is listed alphabetically with their Parent Ed/Special Service Rep and their email & phone number listed.   If a school does not have

A Parent Ed Rep then the PTSA Pres for that school will assign an “acting” rep for you to include on the list.  The job of the “acting Rep” is to fulfill the communication role of the Parent Ed Rep but does not have to attend meetings etc.  Not all the schools have Special Service Reps. For those that don’t the list should show “na” in that place.  The list is on Parent Ed Chair CD as a MS Excel document.  When you go to email it save it to a PDF or Word type document so that the attachment can be opened and printed by all the Reps (not everyone has Excel).  This list should be updated  and distributed whenever there is a change. 

PTSA Council Website –Parent Seminars section: The Council has a great website.  You want to familiarize yourself with it so you know how the Parent Seminar listing is organized.  You also want to know how the Parent Ed Rep Information is organized because that is the “binder” they will use for doing their job.  In addition other PTSAs around the state are copying our program and will be using this information as well.  You would want to periodically check to make sure it is accurate and up to date.  Often you may get emails or calls asking for information about our programs which you can then direct person to the website to find.  However, you will want to know how to direct them directly to that section so be sure to be familiar with the paths.  Always include the website link in your emails so help encourage people go to the Parent Seminar section.

                        http://www.issaquahptsa.org/parented/index.htm

Parent ED Seminar Listing:  IMPORTANT!   This is the most important tool in our program.  It is updated by the Council Webmaster every time you pass information to the Website Master about an upcoming Parent Seminar. IT IS NEVER TOO EARLY TO GET A SEMINAR LISTED ON THIS LIST.  The sooner it is on the list the better.  Your job is to get the information to the webmaster and then to let her/him know when to remove a seminar.  The seminars drop from the list once the seminar is over.  The Webmaster puts on and removes the seminars.  In addition the Webmaster regularly (not less than once a month) sends a PDF version of the Parent Ed Seminar List to the ISD Communications Dept (Director and their assistant) so they can put it on the ISD Website under the Parent Seminar section. Your job would also be to find a way to keep a running list of all the Parent Ed Seminars listed in the year (for historical purposes for count and topics.  At the typing of this document that had not been figured out, however, it is believed that one way to easily do this is if the Webmaster also sent the PDF sent to the ISD to the Parent ED Chair they could use that to cut and paste the final list together.  You do not want to leave all the seminars on the website list until the end of the year or People will stop using it because it will be too cumbersome to weed through old seminar information to reach the new ones. Their active use of the list is more important that the historical listing.

State PTSA Website:  Discussions are under way about the State PTSA developing a Speaker resource on their website.  This would be a place for all the Parent Ed Reps/Chairs to send information via a standard fill in the blank form to their webmaster about Speakers they have used. The hope is that it would be storable by Seminar Topic, Elementary vs. secondary topics, speaker name and geographical location of the speaker. The benefit for you and your team will be to help you find good speakers and seminar topics more easily.  Your job would be to help your team and also submit those speakers you find out about to help keep the database of value.  It is hoped that this will be up and running in 2006-07.

Copyright 2005-2006.  All rights reserved.

No information on this website may be reproduced in any form without the expressed permission of the Issaquah PTSA Council.  This website has been published by the Issaquah PTSA Council for specific use by its members and district staff.  Information contained on this website and other publications of the Issaquah PTSA Council may not be used for purposes of solicitation, either commercial, political or ideological, or for any purpose not consistent with the Bylaws of the Washington Congress of Parents and Teachers.

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Last Updated October 1, 2006.