Blogs

August 18, 2013

PTA/PTO Directory Chair’s critical role

You care deeply about your child’s school and PTA/PTO activities. You are dedicated, have organizational skills and you want to make a difference. That is why you volunteered to become Directory Chair, taking on the responsibility of compiling this year’s school directory. Now, you have a headache, because the process is tedious, wrought with inefficiencies, and demanding. Here are a few sources of headaches for any parent involved in the directory creation process.   1. Collecting Information from Families Some parents never send in their forms. You can’t blame them, though, considering the multitude of forms they are asked to fill out every year by the school. The Directory Chair goes after each parent/family to collect the forms. 2. Typing, Formatting, Editing, Checking all the Information The pile of filled-out address forms is sitting on your desk. Now it’s time for you and your team of dedicated volunteers to type […]
January 22, 2013

School Directory App invaluable tool for parents

Why do parents need a mobile school directory? All parents are always balancing their commitments to work and other responsibilities with their children’s activities and school events. Their school directory and calendar is an invaluable tool for them to communicate with other parents in their child’s class/school/sports team. Parents are mobile and on the run dropping and picking up kids at various activities. However most of the schools do not publish a mobile school directory. The school directories continue to be printed on paper. Take the case of Allison, a working Mom with 2 children in elementary school who lives in our neighborhood. She relies heavily on her babysitter to pick up the children from the school at 3 and take care of them until she comes home in the evening. When Allison’s babysitter’s car breaks down, she has to find someone to pick up her kids and keep them […]
December 4, 2012

Mobile and Online School Directory App Helps Parents in a time crunch

Why did we build this mobile and online school directory app? Parent Teacher Organizations build a school directory for the parents in their school using simple tools – Microsoft Excel and Word mostly. Some of them use a directory software tool which needs knowledge of some programming/building macros and still requires several hundreds of hours of work massaging the data. At the end of this time consuming exercise, the print directory is out of date almost immediately, as some new families have joined the school, some of the parents have changed their phone numbers or address. Mobile and Online School Directory Apps can solve all of these issues. My PTA goes through the same process each year. They collect addresses/phone numbers/get permission slips from parents, all of which can be automated on the web. I developed a mobile school directory app, MobileArq, to solve this issue for PTAs/PTOs/HSAs. To solve […]