MOUNT VERNON — Many schools depend upon and appreciate the innumerable hours of service parent volunteers provide, whether it be as a reading tutor, fundraising coordinator or field trip chaperone. Now, the Ohio Legislature is considering a bill that would make it mandatory for all parents to volunteer in their children’s public schools.
Introduced by Rep. Sandra Williams and co-sponsored by others, House Bill 519 requires the parent of each student enrolled in any of the grades kindergarten through 12 in a city, exempted village or local school district to perform at least 13 hours of volunteer service for the district each school year. It imposes a $100 fine upon those parents who fail to perform the service. The collection of fines could be done by withholding amounts from a parent’s state income tax refund; the money collected from the fines will be used by the department of education to pay the costs of criminal background checks.
In some cases, a parent might have children enrolled in more than one school district. For instance, one child could be enrolled in the resident district, while another child with a disability may be enrolled in another district that offers the special education services the child needs. In that case, according to the Ohio Legislature’s Web site, it appears the parent would be required to perform 13 hours of volunteer service in each district.
The parents must also attend a three-hour orientation seminar prior to the start of each school year. The seminar is supposed to cover the district’s expectations of parents during the school year, including the duty to perform the volunteer service and the consequences for failure to perform that service; strategies for parents to help their children succeed in school, including the importance of regular attendance and managing homework; opportunities for participation in school activities by parents and students; and any other topics considered relevant by the district.
School districts would be required to adopt a policy describing activities in which parents may participate to fulfill the service requirement. The volunteer activities may include tutoring, participation on school or district committees, assistance with extracurricular activities, chaperoning field trips, lunchroom or library assistance, clerical work, or any other activity the board determines is necessary or useful for the district and that can be performed by a volunteer parent.
The superintendent of each school district is also required to report the name and address of each parent who did not complete the volunteer service and who did not give an acceptable reason for not volunteering.
The North Fork Local School District already has a small army of parents and community members who regularly volunteer to help out in the classroom as well as with extracurricular activities. Superintendent Scott Hartley said both the elementary schools and the middle school also have dedicated parent-teacher-student organizations, and the high school has big volunteer programs in athletics and band.
“Right now,” he said, “we already have a number of parents who are very involved.”
It is a good idea for parents to be in the schools, Hartley continued, but he has some reservations about making a volunteer commitment mandatory.
Also, he said, scheduling and maintaining records of the volunteer service of drastically increased numbers could be problematic. North Fork, for example, already hires a person, who is paid through grant money, to coordinate the volunteers with the Help One Student to Succeed program. If HB 519 passes, Hartley is concerned the district might have to hire another person to help coordinate the school-related activities of every parent in the district.
“That’s another added employee that we can’t afford,” Hartley said. “I like the idea, but I don’t think that mandating it is the correct way of doing it. ... Another way might be [for the state] to give schools money for every parent who volunteers. That would probably improve parental involvement without forcing it.”
Ray Richardson, superintendent of the Knox County Career Center, is opposed to making volunteer service mandatory.
“If a person wants to volunteer, that’s great,” he said. “We have parents who volunteer in our preschool and some who help chaperone field trips and things like that. But it’s not that they have to be here. It’s not slave labor. It’s volunteer.
“[The legislation] is trying to force people to be parents,” Richardson continued. “It’s trying to legislate people to be good parents. In fairness, a lot of people are good parents and they just don’t have the time, and they know they don’t have the expertise. If they wanted to be teachers, they would have gone into teaching.”
Since the KCCC serves all of Knox County, as well as some Utica and Clear Fork residents, Richardson is concerned about the cost factor to parents, as well as the time factor.
“What if a student is from a single-parent home and they are struggling to make ends meet; we expect them to pay $4 a gallon for gasoline to come in and volunteer?” he asked.
Richardson said the sheer numbers of potential volunteers is also problematic.
“We have 600 students,” he said, “so we’d have to have at least 600 sets of parents coming in to ‘volunteer.’ Who is going to coordinate all of that? We would have to hire a person to do that. What if one parent doesn’t have custody, or custody changes in the middle of the year. Who has a right to come in, and who doesn’t have the right to come in?”
Due to the nature of the hands-on programs at the career center, Richardson said there are additional considerations with having a multitude of volunteers in the building.
“It’s not like going to an elementary school and helping out in the lunch room or chaperoning a preschool field trip,” he explained. “There are major safety concerns and ramifications. We have power tools and equipment in labs like auto tech, carpentry and welding. Those are specialty areas. It wouldn’t be any different than us sending our teachers out to volunteer at the hospital and them telling the doctors, ‘Let me help you with this diagnosis.’
“The way I look at it,” he continued, “this economy is on an avenue of self-destruct. This country is in a war. We have medical issues, unemployment issues and they’re concentrating on steroids in baseball. In Ohio, they don’t want to deal with any of the real school funding problems and provide resources. ... As far as I’m concerned, they’re straightening up deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Employers could also be affected by HB 519. The bill, as introduced, grants 16 hours of paid leave each year to state employees for participation in educational activities of the employee’s child at the child’s elementary or secondary school, and authorizes a nonrefundable credit against the corporation franchise tax or the commercial activity tax for an employer who pays for leave taken by an employee to participate in the employee’s child’s school activities.
The law is unclear as to if a family has more than one child, whether the 13 hours of service is required for each child, and it does not state whether parents would be required to volunteer in different school buildings in the event their children attend different schools. Telephone calls and E-mails to the bill’s sponsor requesting clarification on those and other questions were not returned.
