Profile: The Room Parent Who Never Left

At Kenwood Community School, the K-5 building near Lake of the Isles led by principal Heidi Johnson, the parent-teacher association fills a calendar that runs from a fall festival and the Kenwood Crawl to the Woodchuck Walk, winter sledding parties and a spring picnic. Most of that work falls to parent volunteers, and the PTA is blunt that it never has enough: "We always need volunteers to help with events, teacher appreciation, in the lunchroom, and more," its site reads, with sign-ups posted for each event.

That is the structural problem behind every volunteer organization that re-forms each fall as families cycle in and out. The group loses hard-won knowledge of how the fundraiser actually runs, which traditions are worth keeping and which ideas have already been tried, unless a few long-tenured volunteers carry it forward. A single parent who stays past their own child's years can be the difference between a group that builds on past seasons and one that starts over.

The PTA is also candid about who is in the room. Its board "should represent our diverse community," the group writes, while acknowledging "we're not there yet." It meets the second Thursday of each month, 6 to 7:30 p.m., at the school or online, and lists teacher appreciation, classroom supplies and lunchroom coverage among the standing needs that go unfilled without volunteers.

[unverifiable: an earlier version of this story profiled a specific longtime volunteer whose children had graduated; that individual is not named and could not be independently confirmed, so this runs as an account of the PTA's documented volunteer need rather than a named profile, with no invented details added.]