Fathers becoming a driving force in PTA
Sunday, March 4, 2012
New York -- At Public School 11 in Manhattan in New York City, the senior president of the Parent Teacher Association is a vivacious chatterbox who ascended the school's executive board the way many do: forging bonds with parents and teachers, doing an impressive stint as treasurer and finally being drafted for the top slot by a growing fan base.
The one thing this executive officer did not do is man the cupcake table.
"I'm not into the baking," said Juan Brea, an admission that once would have been unheard-of in the PTA.
Brea, who favors football, blue blazers, Polo cologne and chopping wood in his Catskills backyard on weekends, is part of the changing face of the PTA. What was once an easygoing volunteer group made up mostly of stay-at-home moms has begun to give way to male leadership.
"This is like running a small business," said Brea, 43, whose day job is chief operating officer at a small nonprofit. "I'm an operations guy. I believe I add value."
A 2009 study by the National Congress of Parents and Teachers and the National Center for Fathering, a nonprofit educational organization, found that 590 of 1,000 fathers surveyed nationwide said they attended school parent meetings. That is up from 470 out of 1,000 a decade earlier.
And in many of the top-rated public schools across New York City, where parent groups have become ever-more-efficient fundraising machines in the face of mounting budget cuts, fathers with financial expertise and a zest for leadership are not just going to those meetings, but running them.
The shift reflects a number of underlying social trends: more women with demanding jobs, more men underemployed in a lingering recession, more shared parenting responsibilities overall and the professionalization of the PTA.
In School District 2, which winds through some of Manhattan's priciest neighborhoods, at least 10 of the approximately 40 elementary and middle schools now have male parent-group leaders, up from just a couple 15 years ago.
On Staten Island, the male firefighters, police and emergency-medical technicians who used to shy away from PTA meetings now call many of them to order. And in brownstone Brooklyn's District 15, PTA boards have been inundated with male leadership, in what officials say is a 15 percent jump from five years ago.
For the most part, female PTA leaders applaud the injection of testosterone. But "both women and men would be lying if they were to say gender dynamics were not an issue," said Michelle Ciulla-Lipkin, a president of the PTA at P.S. 199 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/04/MNA11N9B7O.DTL
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