P&C association divested of all business activities eg canteen, uniform shop, before/after school care programs etc
Strengths
- Enables the P&C to concentrate on basic activities of fund raising, parent participation, safety, traffic and other policy issues.
- Reduces the administrative, management and employment workload on P&C officers, especially the treasurer.
- Reduces the number of P&C subcommittees that may be needed and hence less spreading of volunteers’ efforts.
- Maintains the close link with the principal and school management.
- Retains the P&C association’s capability to reintroduce those lost services if and when the parents find the volunteers and officers willing to take them on again.
Weaknesses
- May result in even less parents volunteering if they see no services being provided by the P&C.
- The school would have to outsource any of cancelled P&C services that the school needs eg canteen, afters programs etc.
- Could reduce the overall feeling of having an active school community.
- May alienate the principal if they feel let down by the parents through the cancellation of the services provided by the P&C.
Opportunities
- Enhance the social capital of the school community by being a point of contact, advice and assistance for parents in need of support.
- Could make use of modern communications technology to engage more parents.
- May make it easier to attract parents to the P&C committee, knowing that they have less to fear from being over burdened with running small businesses.
- It may allow the school to contract commercial service providers on a broader scale and on attractive terms, providing a guaranteed income flow.
- All the P&Cs efforts and resources could be more easily targeted to their basic objectives.
Threats
- Out sourcing of ex P&C services to commercial providers will almost certainly result in higher costs of these services for parents.
- Experience has shown it may not be possible to out source some services as there is insufficient profit in them for commercial service providers.
- Once services are lost to the P&C, it will be difficult to re-establish them in the future particularly if a commercial service provider has been engaged.
- If P&C employed service staff have to be terminated it could cause ill feelings in the school community, where those staff are also members of that community.
Note: This variation on the current model is now operating in around half of our schools.