The Volunteer Vanishes

When Cynthia Duncan’s oldest child was in kindergarten at Dicken Elementary School in 2004, she and her husband would often race to sign up for volunteer opportunities. “There were so many people trying to volunteer that often, we couldn’t even get on the list fast enough,” she recalls. Ten years later, when she began spearheading band registration at Pioneer High School, she was inundated with volunteers too. But this past academic year, only one person offered to volunteer. Especially since Covid, she says, “people are more guarded of their time.” 

The decline in volunteers adds to the challenges facing the Ann Arbor Public Schools, which are reeling in the wake of a budget deficit and staff cuts. “It’s not like there’s a parent at home anymore,” says Gina Maksimchuk, who teaches kindergarten at Abbot. And that means “fewer people are available to volunteer.”

Volunteers are scarcest where they’re needed most. “Most all of our Title I schools have very limited assets of parent volunteers,” says former Burns Park Elementary principal Chuck Hatt. Jen Sheppard, Bryant’s PTO vice president and an art teacher at Bryant-Pattengill, explains that these schools have more students who come from lower-resourced households and need extra support—yet all of the intervention specialists who worked with them were cut. “You have more needs in the classroom … and there’s less support,” she says. “It impacts everyone in the room.”

Related: School Shake-Up

Needs also tend to be greater in the lower grades. When Kathie Weinmann taught kindergarten at Burns Park from 1987 to 2011, she had one or two parents in her classroom every day—mostly women—and had no trouble recruiting them. “Back in those days … there were a lot more parents that were not going to work,” she said. “These little ones need to feel like they’re well cared for. To have the guidance of several adults in the room is a critical piece of it.” 

“It’s hard to do a good job with nineteen four-year-olds by yourself,” says Wendy Rothman, who teaches young fives at Ann Arbor STEAM. That’s a sentiment echoed by Maksimchuk, who adds that students of lower socioeconomic status are hit the hardest: “The affluent will always find a way to make sure their kids get what they need.”

Kory Zhao, president of the Burns Park PTO, says that since the pandemic, “there’s been a loss of community feeling.” Now she sees the same group of eight to ten parents volunteering, “and they’re getting burned out.” Parents may volunteer for “one-offs” but are intimidated by being on a PTO committee, she says. “Sometimes they’ll just write a check, which is great. But sometimes we just need bodies.” Without them, activities like the ice cream social may need to be scaled back. “If we can’t staff things, there’s just going to be less options.” 

Oscar Barbarin, who grew up in Ann Arbor, recalls watching his parents bring tools to help construct a playground at Eberwhite Elementary. “There were people everywhere,” he says, with young and old alike participating. To match that turnout today would be “nearly impossible.” In Seattle where he previously lived, parents often shared their work experiences in schools. Yet in Ann Arbor, “We have people who are literally curing cancer, investigating black holes, doing absolutely amazing things” who aren’t involved.

Rachel Erdstein, who’s in her twenty-fifth year as the media specialist at Burns Park, says that early in her tenure, she had a core group of mothers who “were always there and willing to step in.” But everything changed when Covid shut down the school and parents were no longer allowed in the building. “People got out of practice volunteering,” she says.

Ariel Wan, PTO treasurer at Abbot, is pleased to see many “active and engaged” fathers volunteering. Marshall Anderson, who has a first- and third-grader at the school, says he decided to volunteer at the Scholastic Book Fair “as a way to get connected to the community and the school.” But unlike Wan, he doesn’t see that many other men volunteering. “Maybe it’s some weird male culture thing. I don’t quite get it.”

AAPS trustee Jeff Gaynor says volunteers were a critical part of the school community during his thirty-eight years as a teacher in the district. But the post-2020 world is different: the board created a policy restricting visits, and school buildings and classroom doors are normally kept locked.

“My sense is that schools are less welcoming,” Gaynor says, and that security procedures create a barrier that is too extreme. He believes that “it’s safer to have more people working on behalf of our kids around them than to have this atmosphere where we’re fearful to see anybody we don’t know.”

“It is hard to be in the education field and not have an understanding about concerns over people being inside our schools,” says AAPS spokesperson Andrew Cluley. “We have to take measures to ensure the safety of our kids.”

Parent activist Lena Kauffman adds that every volunteer now needs to undergo a background check. Though she realizes it’s necessary, she believes it has a deterring effect. “Every layer you add to people doing something is another place you can lose people,” she says.

Ingrid Racine, who has a fourth-grader at Mitchell, where 54 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, says she is always willing to volunteer but doesn’t hear of many opportunities outside of special events. Kauffman says that in 2022 she’d been scheduled to return to Forsythe as a lunchroom supervisor, only to be told, after she posted about it on social media, that the school could no longer allow parents there.

“There is a fear in AAPS sometimes of having parents, especially parents who are vocal on social media, come into the school buildings,” she says. Kauffman fought the Covid shutdowns and criticized them when she ran for school board that year, but points out that excluding critics has a cost: Through volunteering, she says, parents “become bonded to that school, and that is critical in keeping them and their students enrolled in public education.”

Cluley says the district “very much likes to have” parents and community members volunteering, and that they “provide extra enhancements to the experience that our kids get every day in our public schools.” He adds that there’s no ban on lunchroom volunteers at Forsythe. In October, the school sent out an email hoping to recruit more supervisors. Kauffman says she responded, and was told her help would be welcome.

Related: Youth Movement

Impacts can be felt at the high school level as well. Robert Ash, director of bands at Huron High, and Karin Sletten-Farjo, president of the Huron Music Association booster group, say it has been difficult to recruit volunteers since the shutdowns. Last summer, volunteers helped raise roughly $30,000 to take 240 band students to Spain. Funding is also needed for uniforms, to maintain and repair instruments, and to provide scholarships for student lessons. “Without the boosters, we couldn’t give them this experience,” Ash says. But Sletten-Farjo says she’s been relying on just a few core parents at a time that staffing has been cut back. The time two co-teachers can spend with Huron band and orchestra students was reduced 30 to 50 percent, so “everyone is spread much more thin.”

But Ash reports “a large uptick” in volunteers since the school year started. He says that parents who were extremely dissatisfied with the staffing cuts felt compelled to step up. Roughly thirty-five parents volunteered at a marching band exhibition in September. They now seem “very energized.”

Trustee Ernesto Querijero says he wants to make sure that all parents feel welcome as volunteers. Historically, he says, white women have led the conversations. He thinks the district needs a diversity, equity, and inclusion officer to “help us direct and meet those people who do want to feel welcome” helping in the schools.

Volunteers can only do so much. “Parents are not a substitute for reading specialists or behavior intervention specialists,” Ingrid Racine says. “We simply don’t have skills to come into the classroom and fulfill those very important roles.”

Wendy Rothman agrees: “Volunteers could be great or a hindrance. What the school needs is more resources.” But in Michigan, state revenue is tied to enrollment, and Ann Arbor has lost about 1,000 students since the pandemic.

That’s left parents and teachers looking for creative ways to fill the volunteer gap. At Burns Park, Kory Zhao is trying to target new parents who will stay involved. Tonya Huffman, a past PTO vice president at STEAM, says they gave parents the option to donate money instead of time. “People appreciated not having to do these labor-heavy fundraisers, and some of the parents who had more income were able to give more.”

At Huron, Ash says, the music boosters pivoted from a time-intensive fundraiser where students would go door-to-door to sell discount cards, to an online fundraiser that brought in $50,000 last year. It took only one volunteer to run and was a far lower workload, Sletten-Farjo says.

Erdstein, the media specialist at Burns Park, is experimenting with having volunteers help with all book checkouts right after student drop-off in the morning. That’s more convenient for parents who are taking their students to school, since they can just stay for a half hour instead of leaving work in the middle of the day.

Volunteerism was the foundation of Burns Park Players productions: Parents once were required to devote thirty hours to put on a show so their kids could get cameos onstage. But former board member Carly Groves says that with dual working parents shuttling kids to numerous activities after school, “people weren’t volunteering as they were before.”

To keep the productions going, there are now buyout options: for $150, a family won’t have to sell a program ad; for another $300, it’s excused from volunteering. (The group uses the money to hire professionals to handle the heavy lifting.) By picking more kid-friendly shows, ticket sales have increased, and they’ve still been able to donate $15,000 a year to the Ann Arbor Public Schools.

Cluley said that the district is working on job postings, virtual job fairs, and working with Edustaff to train people specifically for teaching assistant positions as a way to fill the classroom gaps. Recognizing that parent volunteers may be hard to come by in some schools, the district keeps a list of community partners and is “sending them to the schools that have greatest needs that aren’t being met.”

“I think we got some new people to be on the board at the end of last year who had not been active before, so that was a good sign,” says Zhao. She’s also had success recruiting volunteers from Pioneer and the Ann Arbor Senior Center. Rothman applauds volunteer grandparent programs, where seniors volunteer in classrooms and have lunch with the students.

Danielle Jones, the Observer’s media director, sees volunteerism as alive and well in AAPS. She volunteered with PTSOs at Eberwhite and Slauson when her two children were young, and still does at Pioneer. She also volunteers for Pioneer sports teams and booster clubs.

She works full-time, as do her friends who volunteer. “I’ve never wanted to help out with something and not been able to,” she says, though she acknowledges that parents are more generous with money and providing snacks than providing their time—it’s been harder for her to find parents to clean up or set up an event, for example.

Jones says her experience has been incredibly positive and well received by the schools. With administrators and teachers already overworked and underpaid, “I don’t really feel like it’s their job to invite us to feel welcome,” she says. “Our job as parent volunteers is to support that in whatever way they need us to.” And, without them, “All the extra support for teachers and students would go away, and it wouldn’t make Ann Arbor Public Schools as good as it is,” she says.

Barbarin hopes parents take this message to heart. Volunteering doesn’t need to be a lot of work. “The reality is even one little thing lightens the load,” he said. “Even if a parent has only one hour the whole school year, we can find something for you.

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This article has been edited since it was published in the November 2024 Ann Arbor Observer. The grade level Gina Maksimchuk teaches has been corrected.