PTA in Uproar Over Meeting Schedule

It started as a simple request to accommodate working parents. But at Bret Harte Elementary School in Burbank, a proposal to hold PTA meetings at night has struck like a thunderclap, exposing the fissure between stay-at-home parents and their working counterparts.

After the Bret Harte Parent-Teacher Assn. voted overwhelmingly to stick to daytime meetings--and hold just one night meeting a year--harsh words were exchanged and neighbors stopped speaking, say the night meeting advocates. The uproar has prompted the PTA to reconsider.

For a group concerned mainly with bake sales and school carnivals, the avalanche of bitter feeling has been bewildering.

“I feel like we’ve been judged,” said Rachael Lucasey, who works full-time as an office manager and has a child in kindergarten. “It’s not like this is a perfect world and we have this lavish life and we don’t want to give it up. We work because we have to.”

But the day-meeting advocates say working parents can’t devote anywhere near the volunteer hours that they do, and resent changing for the sake of parents who do less.

“I quit my job because I wanted to be more involved,” said Theresa Crawford, a mother of two at Bret Harte. “Everyone has a choice to make. I made mine based on my priorities, and everyone else makes theirs.”

Passions boiled over briefly at the close of the PTA’s annual night meeting, held Thursday and attended by more than 70 people. Parents interrupted each other, raised their voices, and punctuated the debate with moans and clapping.

“All we are asking for is to have a voice,” said working parent Roland Armstorff, his voice quavering.

Bret Harte’s exceptionally active PTA has nearly 600 members, more than 40 of whom attend the regular monthly meetings held at 9:30 a.m. In the past, the PTA has tried to have one night meeting a year, but few people have attended--rarely more than 10 in recent years, said Principal Diane Berger.

Last year, the night meeting was eliminated. This year, new PTA President Debbie Dunivant scheduled just one, held on Thursday.

The debate has spilled over into other schools in Burbank that hold mostly morning meetings, where PTA presidents report they have been getting more requests for night meetings.

The California State PTA has no rules about when to schedule meetings, said spokeswoman Jan Domene, and statewide, meeting times vary widely. But nationwide, many PTAs have been grappling with issues of how to accommodate working and nonworking parents, said spokeswoman Patty Yoxall.

“We have encouraged our units to be much more flexible,” she said.

The trend is a sign that parents, concerned with shrinking education budgets, are more anxious to get involved in schools, said Sally Leibfried, founder of the alternative Cornerstone Elementary School in the Palos Verdes Unified School District. There, the school requires parents to spend four hours a week volunteering in class. It’s grown from 33 students to 350 in four years, she said.

At Bret Harte, night meetings were first requested by Armstorff, 40, father of a kindergarten student. A production coordinator for films whose wife is a full-time graphic artist, he wants half of Bret Harte’s PTA meetings held at night. For one thing, parents should have a chance to vote on how the PTA’s $31,000 yearly budget is spent, he argues.

But PTA members resoundingly rejected the proposal shortly after school started. Only after a later meeting with Armstorff did Dunivant and Berger agree to consider surveying parents to find out how many favored night meetings. A survey committee was established at Thursday’s PTA meeting.

In the meantime, Armstorff said, neighbors have stopped talking to him, and other parents have warned him that his daughter could be ostracized at school. “I had no idea people would be so upset,” he said.

Dunivant agrees that the issue has become unnecessarily emotional. “Last year we didn’t have a night meeting, and there was not one complaint,” said Dunivant, a mother of three.

Those who attend daytime meetings include several people who work, but whose jobs allow them the flexibility to attend, Dunivant said.

“To ask the people who volunteer at school all day to come back at night after school is unfair just to accommodate parents who can’t help during the school day,” she said.

Day meeting supporters also argue that it’s easier for teachers to attend during the day.

But Crawford said the issue has struck a deeper nerve, too.

“They think we are just a big group of stay-at-home moms who watch ‘Oprah’ every day and it’s just not true,” said Crawford, 41, who came to Thursday’s meeting wearing a large “I Love PTA” button on her pink jacket.

Crawford quit her job as a corporate affairs administrator for a real-estate firm when she had her first child. Her husband teaches golf, and she now markets pagers and long-distance phone services from home.

“People have choices. You can drive a Mercedes, or you can chose to be in PTA,” she said.

But to Lucasey, 28, the office manager, the PTA’s stance is infuriating. She went back to work when her husband was on disability due to a brain tumor, she said. “It’s very emotional for me,” she said. “I would much rather be at home with my kids. But unforeseen things happen.”

Lucasey was one of the parents who crammed the Bret Harte PTA’s night meeting in the school library. Sitting on plastic chairs and undersized stools, parents sipped drinks from Styrofoam cups and munched on tortilla chips through a plethora of reports stretching for more than two hours. They listened through pie and cookie sales, pumpkin giveaways, the annual variety show, and a possible silent auction.

Finally, in the last minutes of the meeting, the scheduling issue was raised, and the meeting quickly fell into borderline chaos, with parents trying to speak over each other.

Working parents were “being unfair to the backbone of the PTA,” one parent said.

Then a woman rose to say the meeting had dragged on too late, and the baby-sitter who had been watching children in another room brought them in--a disruption that effectively ended the meeting. There was just enough time for a unanimous voice vote to approve a committee to do a survey.

Beth Benne, the head of a community college health center whose daughter is a Bret Harte kindergartner, was at the meeting. She said later she hopes the PTA will decide to have at least a few night meetings so she can attend.

She craves the camaraderie of other parents, she said. Despite the tension of Thursday’s meeting, “I was thinking, ‘I love this, this is great,’ ” she said. “I signed up to deliver [Christmas] baskets and to help with the carnival.”