The event that all went wrong!

Automatically generated from the audio, so it may not be perfectly word-for-word.

Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Yvonne and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. But I'm just one of thousands of volunteers up and down the country who all want to make a difference to their schools. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in UK schools to boost budgets, and I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. But of course, no event can be 100% perfect, and I have discovered in my time on the PTA that there's always something that you can learn from one event to improve next time. But I specifically wanted to share my experience with you about an event that kind of happened over the last few months. It was one event, and then out of that one event span a whole series of um bizarre chain reactions, which um meant that September to December 2022, um, in my PTA world, that was a really stressful time for me as chair, and it all came from this one event that was due to happen in summer of 2022. So I also just wanted to say that all the explanations I'm going to do, all the information I'm going to give you is from my perspective as chair and not a general member of the PTA. Um as the chair of the PTA, I feel a great sense of responsibility, and the book for events and any PTA activity ultimately stops with me, which is a bit of extra pressure that I guess um some others on my PTA team won't feel and sometimes it's hard to explain. I guess you will know what I mean if you were also the chair of your PTA. I absolutely love being the chair for many, many reasons, but it's this sort of flip side of the job that I find very difficult as it really pushes me out of my comfort zone. And I know you're supposed to go out of your comfort zone every once in a while, and it kind of strengthens you as a person. But in those moments when I am outside the comfort of my comfort zone, it's incredibly stressful, and those are the times when you really need a supportive team around you to just help you get through that process. And luckily for me, I do have that supportive team at the moment on my PTA, and and also the leadership team at the school is also incredibly supportive. Anyway, that's enough of the introduction. Um, let's carry on and I will explain to you what happened in July 2022. In fact, this all kicked off in May 2022 when we were deciding what to do as our big summer event. So, in previous, well, pre-COVID years, we'd always done a big summer fate, and we thought we would shake things up a bit, do something a bit different this year, which would be a colour run and a mini fate alongside it. So our planning word into action, and we planned um a colour run which would take place on the school field, and we were going to organise the children to do to do laps of the school field. We were going to use um uh equipment from the pea shed sort of along the course so the children could negotiate obstacles, which would also help to slow them down at key points when we could throw the colour powder on them. We were also asking the children to bring water pistols because I read somewhere that if you have a damp t-shirt, the coloured powder sticks a lot better to your t-shirt. So I thought ever so often we could have a little station of children squirting other children with um water pistols, and we were also going to have a sprinkler for the children to run through to make sure their t-shirts got a bit wet. We wanted the event to be free for all the children to attend, so the way it was a fundraising event was that we were asking the children to um collect sponsorship money, so we set up a just giving page where everybody could pay in their sponsorship money, and we set the children a challenge. So we ordered seven different colours of paint powder, and the children's challenge was to get all seven colours on their t-shirts, and if they completed that, then it meant meant that they'd completed the challenge, and they got a medal for doing that. So our medals were made by a member of the PTA from um bits and bobs that we found in the school scrap cupboard, which was which we wanted to do, we wanted to make a sort of recycled uh medal that was quite special for the children. So we called our colour run the rainbow run because there were seven colours of the rainbow that you had to collect on your t-shirt as you ran round the school field. As I've mentioned before, my school's a village school, so the school field isn't huge. Uh, so it's definitely achievable for even the little children to probably do a couple of laps, so we thought that was going to be fine. Then on the school playground, we were going to have a mini fate. So we're planning for a barbecue, a cafe, which is you know, drinks and cakes, um, and about four or five game stalls like uh Tom Bowler, um, face painting, glitter tattoos, um, splat the rat, hook a duck, you know, that sort of general fate kind of thing. And the idea was that the children would complete their colour run on the grass, so the paint powder would be on the grass, then they would sort of move on to the playground afterwards to um get their barbecue food and play some games, and there would be loads of opportunities for the parents to watch the children, do the colour run, and then enjoy the events that we'd organise on the playground and hopefully socialise with other parents and the teachers who were there and just generally bring the school community together because that's what this event was really all about. It was our first one uh must have been in two or three years because of everything that happened with COVID, so we hadn't really come together in a big event for quite a long time. By mid-July, this event was going incredibly well. This is actually the first event I have ever organised on the PTA where I actually had enough volunteers to fill all the posts that I needed to fill, which was a really it felt like a really luxurious position to be in, and I was very happy about it. Everybody was really excited. We had actually done a PTA assembly to the children to explain what a colour run is because we felt some of them might not know. Um, and we did a little demonstration and we played um a YouTube video, a very short one, which another PTA had made of their colour run just to show the children what it would be like, and they were all incredibly excited. It was actually a really wonderful experience. If you ever get a chance to go and do an assembly about a PTA event, children are just the best audience and they also ask the best questions. Anyway, um we had set up a just giving page for sponsorship, and that was going incredibly well. We had a few hundred pounds of sponsorship already, so we were really pleased about that. And to make matters even more exciting, I asked a friend who um is actually a chef in a cafe locally if he would do the barbecue at the fate part. Because I don't know about you, but I always struggle to find somebody to run the barbecue stall because I guess it's not very appealing being stuck making burgers and stuff in a at a hot summer fate. So I've always found it a really difficult stall to fill up with volunteers. But he volunteered to do it for free, free of charge, which was amazing because his children don't even go to our school. Um, so just knowing that the barbecue was under control by a professional chef that would come and cook our burgers and stuff, that was just a weight off my shoulders. So I was really happy the event was going really well, and I was actually looking forward to it. But unfortunately, about a week before the event, everything went a bit wrong. Um it was July 2022, and COVID had started doing the rounds again in our area, and it just started spreading through the school, you know, first through the children, and then the playground at pickup started to look a bit sparse, and so the grown-ups were catching it, and suddenly I realised that I might not have enough volunteers to run the event because obviously, you know, people are there one day and then suddenly they're not there the next day, um, and it can happen quite quickly that somebody has to suddenly isolate for a few days. Um I also felt, which is perhaps a more important point, uh, that um it's it's probably not a very responsible thing for the PTA to be holding an event that gathers lots of people together if COVID is again going through the school. Um and then at that point it was taken out of my hands. The the school said, no, we can't run this event, so we had to postpone the event. So that was a week to go. We hadn't bought any of the barbecue food, luckily, um, but yes, we had to postpone. So we very, very quickly turned it round and quickly booked in a date for September and we publicised the new date. We were very anxious to get the date out there before the summer holidays, um, so people had it ready in their diaries, it wasn't going to be sprung upon them when they came back in September. Um, and then everybody went off to enjoy their summer holidays, uh, which I did do, and um came back to school refreshed for our big event in September. So September rolls around, and we are back to our big event. The event wasn't changing at all, so a lot of the organisation had already been done, but we had to repeat all our publicity, especially for new parents who didn't know about it before, um, and I had to reconfirm the date with all my volunteers and the members of staff at the school to make sure everybody could still come and do their volunteering. Obviously, there were some people who now couldn't do that, so we had to then fill those positions. Um, I tried to make sure that everyone had pre-ordered their barbecue food. Um actually, I'm not sure if I mentioned that. So uh in July we asked people to pre-order and pre-pay for their barbecue food on the school system, and many people did that. When the event was postponed, we sent an email out asking people um not to reorder anything, but if anybody wanted to refund, that was absolutely fine. Uh, with regards to the sponsorship money, again, the just giving account that we had was holding a few hundred pounds, which felt a bit uncomfortable about, but we said if anyone wants a refund because the event didn't happen, we completely understand and we're more than happy to give you a refund. Um, lots of people were really kind and did not ask for refunds, so that was a relief because I wasn't quite sure how we were going to organise that, but I'm sure there's a system at just giving to do a refund, so I wasn't really worried about it. Um but yes, we wanted to people to pre-order their barbecue food, so basically, so we knew roughly how much to buy, um, and we tried to make it really clear that they must not reorder if they had already ordered, because all the orders had been carried across. We did have to issue some refunds, but not very many. So we were a week to go again, and in September, sadly, Her Majesty the Queen passed away, and our whole country in the United Kingdom entered a period of national mourning for about ten days, two weeks. And so school called me and said that we had to postpone the event again because we couldn't have a celebratory event in a period of national mourning, which um which I agree with. It was it did cross my mind it's going to be a bit strange having this event when everyone's feeling quite sad about the Queen, uh, but then it was taken out of my hands, there's nothing I could do about it. Um, and of course, no way that I could have predicted that that was going to happen. And yet it did. So we suddenly had some really serious decisions to make. Uh what to do now. The event's been cancelled twice, we're holding people's barbecue money, we're holding people's sponsorship money. Uh this was in mid-September, the weather was only going to get worse uh towards October, um, and we just really weren't sure what to do. Should we postpone till May, when you still can't guarantee that the weather's going to be warm? The weather in September at this point was still pretty nice, so maybe just holding it in a couple of weeks would be okay. Um there were pros and cons for moving it till May and sticking with a later September date, but what swung it for us was the fact we were holding all this sponsorship money, and I felt really uncomfortable that that that was just sitting there and we hadn't done the event. So in the end, we opted to go for the end of September and hoped that the weather would hold and still be just about warm enough and sunny. Third time lucky, right? I had to redo all the publicity, send it all out to parents so everybody knew uh the new date. I had to reconfirm all my volunteers, and then for people who now couldn't volunteer, obviously I had to fill their positions. And then with about a week to go, everything started to just go wrong. And every day in the lead up to the event which was going to be on the Friday, something different happened, something different changed, and every single day of that week I was just on tender hooks trying to make it through to Friday, uh, but particularly Friday night about eight o'clock when I could sit down with a glass of wine and it would just all be over. So this is what happened to me that week. On Monday, I got the printout of the barbecue orders from school and I went through them, but something looked a bit strange and a bit wrong with them. So because we're a very small school, I do know most of the families at the school. And as I was looking down the list, I I I spotted that some families had ordered, say, six items on the barbecue when I knew there weren't six people in their family. Um and this had happened in a few occasions, and one family had ordered eight burgers and five hot dogs or something. It was very strange, and I couldn't really understand what had gone wrong because the order system was just a drop-down list, they didn't have to type anything in. It was just a drop-down list of how many burgers, how many hot dogs, and you just put the numbers in. And I just couldn't understand how it had happened that some of the orders seemed so peculiar. Uh, and I really panicked actually on the Monday, and I thought I was gonna have to contact all the families in the school and check everybody's barbecue order, which of course I had not budgeted time to do that. Um and yeah, I was I was really stressed out on Monday afternoon. Anyway, took a couple of deep breaths, made a cup of tea, sat down with the list again, and I sort of had a bit of a brainwave that maybe they are duplicate orders. So I went down the list and I um made basically a sublist of orders that I thought maybe needed to be checked, and I took my list to the playground to pick up by the playground. Luckily, all a member of those families was in the playground, so I was able to check with them all, and yes, that is exactly what happened. That because the event had been cancelled twice, some families had hadn't got our email which said, Um, you know, we're gonna carry over the barbecue orders, so no need to reorder if you're happy with your order, and they had in effect ordered again. So I managed to um sort out which orders were duplicates and the school office issued refunds, so we did manage to by the end of Monday I had got a definitive list for the barbecue, so that was all fine. Monday we were sorted. Monday we were back on track. On Tuesday, um I checked the weather forecast. The weather was starting to look a bit dicey. It had looked really good, but now it was starting to look a bit different to the long range forecast. Um and so we decided, as it was looking a bit rainy, that we were not going to use any water pistols or a sprinkler to get the children's t-shirts wet because it looked like Mother Nature was going to help us out and rain on the children, so we didn't need to make them extra wet and cold. So that was that was uh a decision that had to be made. We made that on Tuesday. On the Wednesday, I met with the head of school to talk about the fact that um it looked like it was going to be pretty wet. Obviously, we wouldn't be able to have our stalls outside, so we couldn't do the barbecue, the cafe, the games we had planned because the weather was yeah, looking a bit rainy, so we talked about moving those stalls inside the school. And because the original plan was for everything to be outside, we didn't really need to worry about lots of the paint powder coming onto the school premises. But now that had changed, and so I had to talk to her about what we're going to do with all this paint powder that was on the children, and that just opened up a huge can of worms, really. Um we decided that the children would probably need to get changed after they'd completed the colour run. And I think because of safeguarding rules, you couldn't have um multiple parents um going into a classroom at the same time, helping different children get changed, it just didn't sit with the um the safeguarding rules. So we talked about then each class completing the colour run as a class group, and then the class teacher leading their entire class from the playing fields back into their uh classroom where they could get changed under the supervision of the teacher. And at this point I was just thinking, this is just a turning into a bit of a nightmare because the way I had organized the teachers as the volunteers meant that they couldn't really go and do that, and then I would be left with some gaps of volunteers to help with the rest of the colour on while while they were helping their class get changed. Um it just it just made things much more tricky. Um, but there was nothing I could do about that. Uh, you know, I can't we we need to stick with the safeguarding rules, it's extremely important, but it was very unexpected turn of events, basically. Uh so my husband came home from work later that day on Wednesday and handed me a bottle of wine on which he had taped a label that said Yvonne's medicine for Friday. Uh and I laughed it off and I said, Oh, is this because I've been finding it quite stressful? And he said, Oh, have you um have you looked at the weather forecast? And I said, Well, yeah, I mean I think it's gonna rain. And he said, No, no, no, no, did you see the storm that's coming in? And I said, No, I did not see a storm coming in. So we had a look at the weather forecast. We looked at a few different weather forecasts, and they all said the same thing, which is obviously very unusual for weather forecasts to agree, but they all said, Yes, Yvonne, there is a storm coming in. Um, the weather's going to be atrocious, it's going to be very heavy rain, it's going to be very windy, which of course are exactly the opposite conditions that you want to hold a beautiful summer colour on. Um, and of course, there's going to be no barbecuing or outside stalls in that weather at all. No, no, no.

So

On Thursday, after a night of not very much sleep, um my team and I decided that we were just gonna have to not do the colour run. I mean, there was just no way, looking at the forecast, there was just no way we could make the children run around the field in shorts and t-shirts, in wind and rain and be cold, and the parents are not gonna want to stand out there and watch them. It just wasn't going to be the event that we so desperately had planned it to be in the summer. So we had to make the decision that we were not going to do the colour run, but that we could do the other stalls inside the school. Not ideal at all, but that's the only thing we could do. And I was really worried about how the parents were going to react to this news. Everybody had been so excited about this colour run. You know, we've been going on about it for months and months, and the children were really excited, and I was I was really um worried that the parents were going to be really angry um that we couldn't do it, but of course, you can't do it if the weather's atrocious. Um so we sent an email out from the school explaining the situation, and I put a message on the parents' um uh WhatsApp group that we have, the school, and actually they were really understanding and sympathetic, so I was I was very relieved, and it was in fact exactly what I needed at that point for someone to say, you know, I'm really sorry that this has happened to your event because it was such a shame, and all these things were completely out of our control. It's not like we had planned it really badly and then it had all gone wrong. You know, to have a COVID outbreak and then our queen passing away is nowhere near the level of anything that we can control at all. Um again, we offered refunds for the sponsorship money because again, the colour run wasn't taking place. But I'm very um humbled to say that nobody asked for a refund. So all the sponsorship money was available to the PTA, which was lovely and really, really amazing. Um, I also felt like I couldn't ask my friend the chef who had offered to do the barbecue. I couldn't ask him a third time to change his date. So uh luckily my husband stepped in and we arranged to use the school kitchen to cook the sausages and burgers on um in the hall. So that was taken care of to my relief because obviously people had pre-ordered their barbecue food, and I just really did not want to issue all the refunds for that as well. Um, because that's one of the best stalls, as you know, um, to make um some good fundraising on. So we had to try and squeeze everything into the school hall. Now, because our school is a village school, our hall is not very big, and we we've only got a couple of classrooms um in the same building, so we don't really have a lot of space to sort of spill out from. Um, and I knew it was going to be crowded, probably too crowded, but there was just nothing that I could do. We had to put some sort of event on, we just had to go with it. So, Friday morning, I had my BDI on the weather forecast, I was checking it every five minutes, and I was now praying it was going to actually rain because I had cancelled the event based on the weather forecast, and I was just so worried about making the wrong decision. I think this event has been so peppered with so many different decisions to be made, so many things going wrong, and then a new decision had to be made. And I have to tell you, I'm not great at actually making decisions. I find it really hard because I'm constantly worried that I'm making the wrong decision. And especially where the weather's concerned, you have no idea if the weather's going to do what they said it was going to do, if they got the forecast right. And um so yeah, I was just really wanting it to rain so that at least the decision to cancel the colour run had been correct. And thankfully the storm came in as promised, um, and the weather was atrocious, and it was really cold, and it was really windy. Um so in a in a day where it was quite a stressful day, that did make me just feel a bit better that yes, we had made the right decision. And of course, um, loads of people came to our event, um, and you know, I think they were really keen to support this event that had been basically going on for months. Um, and it it was really, really busy, loads of people there, loads of people having their faces painted, having cups of tea and cake, and getting their barbecue food. And our stalls did really well. It's one of the best events um we've held. Uh, we had a tombola, and the tombola was made up of just loads of donations from families, and I think the tombola sold out in about 15 minutes. Every time I looked over to the tombola, it just looked like a scrum was going on, it's so so popular. We didn't um eat all the barbecue food that we bought because the event that we actually ran was between 3 and 4 pm, whereas the um previous plan um was going to be between 3 and 5 pm, so more around tea time. So unfortunately, we didn't sell all the barbecue food that we bought. I think some people who had pre-ordered maybe even didn't have their burgers just because it was, you know, the wrong time of day. So we still made a profit on that, but it it was just a shame I felt that people couldn't enjoy it as we'd originally intended it. Okay, so I do have the figures in front of me. I thought you might be interested to see how we got on. So our cafe, which sold squash, um, cups of tea and cake, all the cakes were donated. Um, we took £122 on that. The glitter tattoos made uh £17, face painting was £11.50, our barbecue actually made a profit of £300, which was fantastic considering you know all the palava with it. Splat the Rat made £24.50. Our Guess the Sweets in the Jar was £14.50, our uniform sale that was secondhand uniform was £24. Um Hook a Duck took £29 and the Brick Abrack table £44. Our Tomboler made a profit of £92, and then we had our sponsorship money of £661. So we took about £1,000 in total, and our event was only an hour long. Obviously, we didn't do the rainbow run part, but we still got the sponsorship money. So when those figures came in for my treasurer, I was so happy that people had made the effort to come to an event that had been condensed into an hour and squashed into the school hall. It was really um touching actually to see the school community come and support us despite all the difficulties that we had had with the event. But then there will always be things that you just cannot plan for or even imagine, in fact, that will happen. Um, and so we did the best that we could under the circumstances, and we could only make decisions about what to do based on the information that we had. So, for example, um, with the weather forecasts and about wondering whether to go ahead or not, I had to base my decision on the weather forecast that we had at the time, and I remember thinking to myself, I think any reasonable person would take the same action here. If the weather is looking atrocious, you know, anybody else in my position would decide to cancel that the outside part of an event. So that really helped me because as I said before, I'm not uh greater making decisions and I always think I've made the wrong decision or I worry that I've made the wrong decision. Um and it's really important when you're planning events at school and you're part of the PTA to have a really supportive team around you. Um I mean feel incredibly lucky that my PTA team is very supportive, as are the teachers and all the staff at my school are really, really supportive of the PTA, and that does make things so much easier. If you know that other people have your back and will support decisions that you make, it makes it a lot easier, and you know that you're not on your own making some tricky decisions. Um I did suffer with d decision fatigue because the event had been cancelled so many times. I had to make all the same decisions all over again three times, and I just found that mentally it was really, really draining and tiring, and I did really run out of energy on that. So um that's something that I need to be aware of for myself. I mean, other people might be more accustomed to making lots of decisions, but I'm not, so I found that really tricky. Um another thought I had was that having a plan B or a plan C at the start of this whole palava, like having a plan B or a plan C ready in July, might have been a good idea. Perhaps I should have thought more carefully about what if it rains and had a plan in place for that, but I I kind of didn't really. I sort of had a vague plan that we'd probably go inside, but it was summer, it's probably not likely to rain. Uh having said that, I don't know if a plan B or a plan C would have really helped me in this situation, because I still had to reorganise volunteers, I still had to reorder, reorganise the barbecue food, etc. Um, so I'm not entirely sure if that would have helped me or not, because I kind of had to plan with what was going on at the time, and obviously a lot of the time I couldn't foresee what was going to happen. Um a positive that came out of it was that it was a good test of our school's inside space. So if it happens again that one of our outside events has rained off, um I now know what it's like to have all the stalls squeezed into school. I didn't have that, I haven't had that experience before, so um it was really helpful to think about how much space is required around each stall and whether having our cafe in an outside classroom and then people had to walk between the outside classroom and the main school building, whether that was okay for the atmosphere of the event. And actually it was fine, and we couldn't we couldn't have done it any other way because there wasn't space for the cafe anywhere else. Uh, we did put a couple of games in the cafe part so that when people went over there, there's something else for them to do. So I think that worked really well. Um, so that's one of the positives that I'm taking away from it. Um, another positive sort of was that pre-ordering the barbecue food did work really well. Um, obviously it sort of backfired on us a bit because the event was cancelled twice, but I think if the event hadn't been cancelled, the orders would have been fine. Um, and I think, yeah, I think I would definitely try that again. Let's talk about the knock-on effects that happened with this event. I coped with reorganising that event three times, and it was really successful in the end, which I was pleased about. But there were some knock-on effects from that. So the first was that our AGM would normally have been at the end of September, but obviously we didn't even have a date for it because the rainbow run actually happened at the end of September. So the AGM was the next priority to organise on our PTA calendar. And the second knock-on effect was the uh unexpected way that I felt I had put all of my energy into that rainbow event three times over, and basically my tank was empty. I was really thrilled that the event had been really successful, but the cancellations and postponements and the uncertainty and all the decisions that I had to make and my team had to make um had completely drained my buckets of enthusiasm and motivation. I was just completely empty, and I'd never experienced this before about the PTA. So it was really strange for me to not be enthusiastic about anything and not want to move anything forwards. Um very out of character for me completely. Um so our AGM ended up being after half term, so that would be right in fact, I think it was a date in early November, so it's really, really late. Um that was okay. The AGM was all okay. AGM was all okay, but we only had six participants at our AGM. We had two teachers and four PTA members, which meant that we were quart, but only just. Um as I've been PTA chair for about five or six years, I've become very used to not having extra parents come along to the AGM. I have stopped expecting random people just to come to the AGM, which is what I was hoping for when I first started. I've now realised that people just don't do that now. Um so I wasn't expecting extra people parents to come along, but for some reason, after all the effort we had put in to the colour run, um I did feel really disappointed that more people weren't there. I had I always bill the AGM on emails that I send out to parents. I always say it's the AGM, but it's also a celebration of all the things that the that your PTA has achieved at this school over the past year. And I encourage, you know, I try and encourage people to come because we do our reports, you know, there's the chair's report, which is a summary of all the wonderful things that have happened, all the money that we've um raised and all the ways in which we have brought the school together, then the treasurer's report, which which goes over in detail all the money that has been raised and how much money we now have. Um, and then we, you know, sort out the committee positions, um and go over a couple of other things. But I always see it as a really lovely summary of what has happened and and lots of things to celebrate. And so for some reason this time I just felt really disappointed that nobody else wanted to come and celebrate with us, really. It did actually take me quite a while to um bounce back from from that colour-run experience. In fact, I don't think I really did bounce back until January. Um, so I'm recording this just early February, but yeah, af after the Christmas holidays and we were back at school at that point, I sort of felt right, I feel refreshed, a bit more refreshed. It's a new year. Um, we have a new project on the go, which I will talk about in a future podcast. Um, a new fundraising goal, and that was something positive to aim for, um, and I felt like my energy had come back a bit. But yeah, I was I was really surprised that um those events had such an effect on me. I didn't realise I didn't expect it, um and and it kind of set us back slightly, I suppose, from pushing a few things forwards, but that there generally wasn't anything I could do about that. I I think I just needed a break, I just needed a rest, uh, which I didn't quite get in November and December because there were some other PTA things I had to sort out. But going through the Christmas holidays, I did have a bit of a rest then. Um so I'm back to it now, people. My nose is back on that grindstone, and as I say, we're working towards something exciting this year, which I will update you on soon. And so that was an update on the worst event I have ever organised and all the details about what happened. I think it's so important that we are able to share our stories as it reminds other PTA volunteers that they are not alone when things go wrong, and we can only do our best under the circumstances. Of course, the schools and the children and the parents still appreciate everything that we do, and I'm sure all PTAs have some horror stories lurking. And I would love to hear about yours. You can drop me an email using hello at ptapodcast.com or use my Facebook page, ThePTA Podcast. I would love to read out some stories so that we can all share them, but of course I would keep your messages anonymous if you wanted me to.