Why I won’t volunteer at my sons’ school anymore.

As the mother of two young boys, I get almost daily requests to volunteer at my sons’ elementary school. They all merge in my head after a while, a seemingly endless and unsatisfied longing for my time. “I know I can count on you,” began one recent missive on behalf of … I forget exactly what. The elementary school musical? The Halloween parade?

To judge by the number of appeals I receive, you would think my children are in desperate need of parental sacrifice. But they aren’t. We live in a fairly affluent suburban town where the median family income is slightly above $100,000. And yet I am constantly being asked to give my time to the school, to bring in food for countless celebratory festivals and chaperone everything from field trips to student-play rehearsals. Most of these unpaid volunteer activities, while seemingly well-intentioned, are, in fact, unnecessary make-work, designed to make us feel good about ourselves even as they allow us to ignore more significant social problems, like overcrowded and underfunded schools nearby but not in our neighborhood.

And it goes without saying that “parental sacrifice” is really “maternal time commitment.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women give their precious free time to charity at significantly higher rates than men. And no one is more inclined to perform volunteer work than mothers of children under the age of 18. In any given year, almost 40 percent of them will undertake unpaid charitable work of some kind, often related to their children. The pressure to volunteer places unfair expectations on busy mothers, who are judged by the amount of time they spend coordinating class parties and stuffing envelopes. “Your ability to volunteer is how you are measured as a mother,” observes Rosalind Wiseman of Mean Girls fame, who has also written about parental conflict in Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads.

This would all be good for a laugh—and some wholesome feminist rage—if children in the town two miles down the road didn’t need help with much more than holiday-party planning. Chances are that some of the 25 percent of American children on food stamps are attending school in a neighboring district, where the vast majority of students come from disadvantaged backgrounds. But these kids might as well live in another country for all the attention the parent volunteers at most middle-class schools pay them. I’ve never received a note in my inbox requesting I read stories to boys and girls whose parents don’t speak English, or to raise funds for schools where more children receive federally subsidized lunches than not. The only time I hear about poor kids is when our school holds its annual coat and food drives.

The way in which we distribute children among schools accounts for the gap. Socioeconomic division in schools tends to follow housing patterns—which means housing segregation by income. In school districts from New York to California, income disparities allow parents with children attending schools in prosperous neighborhoods to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for everything from extra classroom aides to art teachers, while children in schools with a lower-income (or less motivated) parental cohort get little in the way of added services. The trick is that we rarely have to face up to the discrepancy. We congratulate ourselves on doing good for our own schools. No one makes us thinks much about the other ones somewhere else that need more.

Tags: mean girls, public school, Rosalind wiseman, volunteering

Helaine Olen is the co-author with Stephanie Losee of Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding and Managing Romance on the Job and is now writing a book on the culture of personal finance.

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Why I'm Sick of Volunteering at My Kids' Wealthy School