I am wondering how your respective schools handle involving boarding parents (who are not local) in the parents’ association. My question is does your school post minutes of parents’ association meetings (behind a parent portal), post videos of meetings (live or after the fact?), boarding parent auxiliary board?. Of course, our school, sends out a weekly newsletter to the whole school highlighting news and different events. I know from my past involvement at my son’s schools, that important discussions and information can be shared at these parents’ association meetings, and I wonder how other schools handle it (or do they just assume since we sent our child to boarding school, we are not interested in knowing what is going on at the parents’ meetings – I do not mean that in any snarky way). I realize that day parents are local and therefore are going to run the parents’ associations in most cases, but where the majority of parents (at least in my school) are boarding, I wonder how is input of boarding parents facilitated in a way that can benefit the entire community… Maybe I am suffering parents’ association withdrawal (smile), but not really…I just would like to know what is going and be able to get information on parents’ association meetings (in a way that does not involve travelling to DS’ school for a meeting) and offer input (or not)…Thanks.
Our school did live feed for all meetings and parents who were not at the meetings could participate (not just watch) that way. Certain presentations were also archived and accessible through the parent portal.
There was always a light dinner meal beforehand so people could socialize a bit. And there were almost always quite a few boarding parents there (including as officers, committee chairs, etc) who were within an hour or 2.
There were a number ways for parents to be involved. Some were definitely harder for distant parents, but others could either tie into campus visits (making the flower arrangements for commencement ) or were handled by webex meetings. We had a lot of students from all over the world, so the school definitely had the remote communication thing mastered.
You could volunteer to make calls for the annual fund. Always a nice way to chat with other parents
With all that said, high school in general and BS in particular don’t make the same participation opportunities available that most of us had in elementary and middle school. DS would have said hooray for that, but I missed the community.
At Cate, since most parents (other than parents of day students) live too far away to drive to PA meetings, many events are on LiveStream. These include PA meetings, special assemblies, some sporting events etc. There is always a way to be involved and the local parents really appreciate whatever help the boarding parents can give.
My kids’ BS doesn’t have a parents association (in fact, it never even occurred to me until just now that a BS might have one). There’s lots of communications from the school in a variety of ways to parents, and opportunities for parents to get involved, but no actual PA. I would guess this might be the norm for boarding schools, or at the least for boarding schools where the vast majority of kids are in fact boarders.