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Collected Item: “PTA during Covid-19”

Give your story a title.

PTA during Covid-19

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

Photographs

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

I have been volunteering in the PTA for the last 13 years. Two of these years occurred when I was the PTA president at my daughter's middle school during the Covid-19 pandemic. Once the pandemic started and Utah moved all schools to online in March 2020, PTA had to adjust. We cancelled all of our meetings and delivered the end-of-year teacher gifts to the teachers’ and staff’s homes. The next school year (2020-2021), the students returned to school but had to wear masks and large group activities were cancelled. PTA held our monthly meetings outside or via Zoom (once it became too cold to hold them outside) and we cancelled our assemblies. The school district required PTA to individually wrap treats/food that we provided for the teachers. Rather than the potluck-style lunches that we had always provided, we needed to cater the lunches which tripled our costs. We went from a budget of $700 for teacher lunches/treats/gifts to $2200. We made significant cuts in other areas in order to make this adjustment.

The pictures above show treats for the teachers from 2021 that are individually wrapped and a partial list of teacher addresses and driving times when the PTA delivered presents to the homes of teachers and staff in 2020 because they were working from home. It took about eight volunteers, each with a 1 1/2 to 2 hour route, to get everything delivered.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

#PTA, #teaching, #students

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Marci LeMonnier

Give this story a date.

2021-10-05
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