When Stating The Obvious Is The Best Course of Action

I decided to chair my kid's school council. 

I know -right? I was thinking the same thing? The P.T.A? 

I. Would. Never! 

Let's be honest, I had visions of basically every Hollywood Movie I've ever seen. Where the PTA was a bunch of catty women who all stayed home. None of them worked so the PTA was the most important thing in the world to them. 

Me - on the PTA? No F-ing way. 

Then as is a theme, 2020 happened. And I realized if I didn't do something - who would?

You see, my kid's school is super diverse. You've got every race, religion and colour. It's one of the reasons I love my neighbourhood. But I noticed all of his friends he played with or had play dates with looked like him - white kids. 

So I started asking him about other friends. I started asking to have play dates with them. I started meeting other parents who didn't look like me and our kids had a blast. I started hearing other families' stories and I realized they weren't represented in the school. 

So in true Tiffany, fashion having never been to a PTA meeting - I volunteered to be the chair. I got to be co-chair because me and one other woman self-nominated. So glamourous really:)

So there I was having never been to a meeting and my partner and I were supposed to help build the school's direction. 

I went to the first meeting to get a flavour of how things ran (because I had never been before) and it was... fine. Fairly bland really. Lots of formality around passing bylaws (really?) But I did notice one thing. There were all white people on the council and in attendance. 

After the meeting was done, I followed up with my partner to see if she noticed the same thing, She did. So now the question was - what do we do about it?

Through the next month leading up to the meeting I sought out people who didn't look like me and asked them about School Council. Did they know what we did? Did they care? Were they interested in the school's direction? Turns out - like me circa 2019- they had no idea what School Council did. 

In walks to school, from school in the park, I had more conversations. I found out a huge reason people didn't attend was due to the time of it. Nighttime right over dinner and bedtime was hard enough - let alone excusing yourself for a 90 minute meeting. If you're any parent let alone a single parent - that's basically impossible. 

Our next meeting happened. It was tighter - we stayed on schedule but in an open forum discussion, I raised the obvious. 

"I'm sure others are aware but in a school as diverse as ours, this council is all white"

Silence

Longer silence. 

People waited for someone to speak. And finally...

"I'm so glad you brought that up" and the conversation started flowing. People started interjecting what was wrong with the current format, how it felt weird, formal and didn't work for all people. People brought up things like donations programs, lunch programs, clothing drives. People started talking more than I had heard them ever talk. 

And it was awesome. 

And we got some great ideas on how we can be more inclusive, invite more people to these meetings, change the format so it could work better and move forward. All we had to do was get a tiny bit uncomfortable. All it took was stating the obvious. 

Call it out. Make it uncomfortable. Get to work fixing it. 

More work can be found on Tiffanyheimpel.com