Transition Planning

When I started The Sustainable PTO, it came out of the desire to make my children's school PTA more sustainable. When I came on board, I saw how much information and experience was lost as volunteers moved on and I didn’t want that to continue. I considered the kind of information I constantly had to go looking for and started building templates to help others who are in the same boat.

While those templates will absolutely be helpful and I plan to sit down with my PTA president and principal to get all the information they need written down, saved digitally, and printed out, I realized that I’m transitioning out of my role of secretary and I have a lot of knowledge to impart before I go!

When I announced my plan to step down as the secretary, I was fortunate enough to have someone waiting in the wings. A mom who has been involved with the PTA for a long time expressed interest in taking over my role but was wary. What did the secretary actually do?

And that was the rub. Because even though I served as secretary, I also planned most of our family fun nights. I’ve helped set up fundraisers. I planned Teacher Appreciation Week. I shop for supplies. I organize the closet. I do the things that need to be done because who else will?

My experience with the PTA is a reflection of what happens when you have too few volunteers. It’s not a unique experience to our school and I think it’s becoming a bigger problem for parent teacher organizations as more and more groups are asking for help. It’s hard to convince parents to commit their time to the PTO when they’re also being asked to help coach soccer, do costumes for the play, pick weeds at the local park, and more.

I had to convince another mom to step into my role by outlining what my role should be instead of what it actually became.

If you search the role of the secretary for nonprofit organizations, it’s very bare bones. Based on Robert’s Rules of Order, which governs most incorporated groups, the secretary is in charge of record keeping, correspondence and communication, and meeting agendas and minutes. That’s it! But how often does that actually happen?

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I took over the role of the secretary from someone who, like me, did more than the role actually required. In fact, I was surprised to learn she was the secretary rather than the president, because it felt like she did more for the group than the president did.

She did her best to set me up, but a lot had to be learned on the fly. I attended a training with the state PTA, but didn’t find it particularly helpful because it really focused on the Robert’s Rules. It emphasized taking minutes at meetings, but glossed over correspondence and even record-keeping. It really wasn’t until recently, as I started preparing for the transition that I realized I was supposed to carry our membership list and bylaws with me to every meeting.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been writing a lot about what the secretary role looks like in a Google document. I’m using headers and sub-headers to created a table of contents. I’m visiting the various websites and tools I use as secretary and taking screenshots to explain how everything works.

I’m probably over-explaining. I learned most of these tools by poking around and figuring it out myself, but I don’t want to put that burden on the next person or the one after that. I don’t want to be on-call for the next few years, offering to explain something that I did in the past because I forgot to mention it in the brief meeting we set up to pass things along.

So, I’m writing it all down, as much as I can think of. And when I’m done, I’ll print it out and put it in a binder. I’ll save the file in our Google workspace and pass the binder onto the incoming secretary with the hope that when she’s ready to pass it along, she’ll update the information, add more, and finally, build and grow our institutional knowledge.

And when I’m done with that, I’ll start the next binder, a month-to-month PTA planning guide. And when I’m done with that, I’ll start a fundraising binder. And then a family fun night binder. And maybe if I’m lucky, this PTA will be set up for a future without me. Maybe more volunteers will sign on board, because they see how organized we are. Because they know what to expect from joining and volunteering their time.

One can only hope.