As a Group, Dads Clubs Struggle for School Role

They were new-era dads, turn-of-the-millennium dads--involved in their kids’ schools, fixing sticky doors, bringing Taco Bell for lunch and forming PTA-like clubs of their own to skirt the more procedural groups dominated by moms.

Only two years ago, Orange County was home to a dozen or so flourishing fathers clubs in which guys would get together, find out what was needed at a given school, assign the chores and then do them.

Now a UC Irvine graduate student researching the groups has found that only about half those clubs remain. While several clubs have strong participation and membership, others have struggled to survive in a system some fathers say is not set up to permit the kind of help they have to offer.

“I was shocked that about two years ago, when I first heard how wonderful the clubs sounded and look at all the community support they had, to find that now there are about only five of them still going,” said Rachelle Strauss, who is studying Orange County dads clubs for her doctoral dissertation at the UCI School of Social Ecology.

Even very involved fathers say they are feeling their way through unfamiliar territory with few examples to emulate.

“Growing up in the ‘60s, the typical dad didn’t join the PTA and wasn’t really involved in schools. Moms did the fund-raising and dads went to work,” said Randy Parker, who heads a successful dads club at Serrano Elementary in the Orange Unified School District. “Looking at how things were when I was a kid, I wanted to be something different.”

Dads clubs began gaining in popularity several years ago, as a way to get more fathers involved in the schools. Fathers were always welcome at PTA meetings and occasionally became active in them. But often, the Parent Teacher Assn. tends to be a de facto Mother Teacher Assn., and fathers were loath to tread on their turf.

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Just how many dads clubs exist in the county is difficult to determine. Some have scheduled monthly meetings with enrolled membership, while others defy the traditional definition of a club, rarely holding scheduled meetings but turning out by the dozens for events.

Some dads show up to play tag at recess or make monthly efforts to share a fast-food lunch on campus with their children.

One of the clubs that Strauss identified as having fallen off was the once-active group at El Camino Real Elementary School in Irvine. Two years ago, the principal described the group as “dynamite.” The dads had refurbished the bathrooms and raised $7,000 for computers.

Now the group has no regular meetings or agenda. Hogan Hilling, who has two sons at El Camino Real, said he has given up on organizing a formal dads club.

Still, from time to time he arranges events at the school and says they tend to go off pretty well--in guy fashion, that is, with no agenda and little planning.

According to national studies, a father’s participation in a child’s school life directly affects a child’s attitude toward school and ultimately, how well the child does academically.

Yet not only do fathers lack a firm foothold in most of the county’s schools, they have lost some of the gains made in recent years. What happened? Strauss, who has not completed the study, has some suspicions based on her observations.

Successful fathers clubs tend to have good relationships with mother-dominated PTAs, Strauss said, while rocky relationships between the two groups can leave dads holding their toolboxes amid misunderstandings and miscommunications.

“Often, PTAs want to know why the men need their own club,” Strauss said. “But PTAs are very formal, and woman like to chitchat, while men like to get to business and move on.”

Eager dads, zealous to swoop into a school and fix matters, sometimes step on the toes of longtime volunteers, Strauss said. Occasionally, she said, dads can be downright aggressive about trying to take charge of situations that have long been handled by others.

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Fathers, though, say that their involvement in schools occupies a more subtle space that involves neither feuding with mothers nor commandeering volunteer efforts.

Parker, who had been part of one of the county’s long-lived clubs at Handy Elementary in Orange, said he has a group of about 40 fathers who volunteer on a regular basis at Serrano.

The group just finished its major project for the year, installing backpack racks in about 10 of 18 classrooms.

After one dad installed a set early in the year, they were so popular that all the teachers wanted them. The classrooms took up donations, the PTA chipped in some money, and now backpacks are no longer piled in a heap in the front of the room.

“One dad worked for a lumber company and delivered the wood to another dad who prefabbed it, and then he transferred it one Saturday to the school. We put them up in two hours,” Parker said.

Hilling also has found the ad hoc approach works best when he wants to get fathers at the school.

A few months ago, Hilling spread the word that dads would be welcome for a father-child doughnut breakfast at the school, and about 20 dads showed up, with their children. Two months ago he announced another one--and that this time the doughnuts would come from Krispy Kreme. Seventy dads and their children showed up, to Hilling’s surprise.

“I’d only bought six dozen doughnuts and had a small pot of coffee, but--this is the difference between men and women--[men] don’t panic and say ‘Oh no, the decorations aren’t done right’ or ‘There’s not enough food.’

“The dads said no big deal, went to the vending machines and bought all the cookies, candy and chips and gave it to the kids. The kids really loved it,” Hilling said.

Hilling, Parker and several other fathers said they have had to learn how to become involved in their children’s schools--it was not something they grew up seeing.

“I think the idea can intimidate men,” Parker said. “But I wanted to be something different.”

He did attend some PTA meetings and found a structure of protocols and rules somewhat daunting. He has a good relationship, however, with the PTA, which has strongly supported the Serrano dads club.

It also helps that the two groups overlap at Serrano.

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Glenn Easterbrook is in the dads club, but he is also vice president of the PTA.

Easterbrook’s involvement began five years ago: “I made a conscious commitment when my third child was born, to spend more time watching her grow up,” he said.

The engineer’s commitment also extends to membership on the school site council and the technology committee and as school representative to the superintendent.

If fathers want to be involved in their children’s schools, Easterbrook said, then they will, with or without clubs to ease the way.

“It has mostly to do with the person himself--not the PTA or a dads club or a principal or anybody--and I think that’s true whether it’s business, a recreational function, a diet, whatever. You have to be committed.

“Oh, and by the way,” he said, “women are more than welcome at our dads club.”