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2
Development
of Organized School
Volunteerism in the United States
Although voluntary participation in many different areas of effort is
woven throughout American history as a nation, school volunteerism as
an organized effort to bring parents and other citizens into schools as
unpaid aides is relatively recent. The story of this effort began in the
1950s, when a group of New York City civic activitists became concerned
about the educational needs of children who entered school with the dis-
advantages of poverty, physical handicaps, or the inability to speak Eng-
lish.
When they began planning for an organized volunteer program, the
New York City group knew of at least six other school districts in the
country that used volunteers. They were also aware of work being done
in England, where in London schools alone 2,500 volunteers were assist-
ing in guidance and health services under a carefully organized plan.
They also knew that principals in some elementary schools in New York
City welcomed volunteers usually parents or interested neighbors-on
an informal basis, with no recruiting or training involved.
What the New York City citizens had in mind was a more structured
and accountable volunteer activity that would recruit volunteers, provide
training, and consult teachers about whether they wished to have volun-
teers in their classrooms. In 1956, the Public Education Association (PEA),
a citizen advocacy group that had promoted education in New York City
for half a century, led an organized school volunteer program with 20
volunteers who offered their services on a regular weekly basis at P.S. 191
in Manhattan to tutor children in reading. From the beginning, the pro-
gram emphasized that the volunteers would be trained.
The program flourished in the pilot school, and requests for volunteers
6
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ORGANIZED SCHOOL VOLUNTEERISM IN THE U.S.
7
came to the PEA from other schools. In 1959, the Ford Foundation granted
$80,000 to the PEA to expand the school volunteer program. It was un-
derstood that the grant would also be used to improve recruitment, train-
ing, and utilization of volunteers and that over the 3-year period of the
grant the New York City Board of Education would pick up an increasing
share of the cost of the program. The PEA also received financial support
for its volunteer initiative from the New York Fund for Children, the Eda
K. Loeb Foundation, and the Mary W. Harriman Fund.
As word of the New York City program spread, the PEA received more
requests than it could handle for advice and help with setting up similar
programs in other school districts around the country. In 1964, it asked
for and received another 3-year grant from the Ford Foundation to aeate
a National School Volunteer Program under the PEA umbrella.
Under the grant, the PEA agreed to assist citizen groups in about 20
large cities to train school volunteers, using the methods that had been
successful in New York City. The PEA added to its staff in order to
provide consultant services and conduct workshops in the designated cit-
ies and to prepare training materials. Ultimately, 17 large cities received
assistance from the PEA in creating or expanding school volunteer pro-
grams: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Los
Angeles, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,
San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.
Buoyed by the success of the National School Volunteer Program, a
group of advocates approached the Ford Foundation in 1968 to ask for
support for a School Volunteer Program that could become self-sustain-
ing. Ford responded with a 1-year grant for the aeation of an independ-
ent National School Volunteer Program (NSVP). The new NSVP, now in-
corporated as the National School Volunteer Program, Inc., established an
office in New York City.
After the expiration of the Ford Foundation grant in 1969, the NSVP
closed its national office, and for a number of years it operated from the
school district of the person then serving as president. The organization
continued to convene national meetings, provide technical assistance to
new programs, and facilitate the exchange of information between volun-
teer programs in school districts around the country. In 1975, a planning
grant from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation to the National School
Volunteer Program, Inc., enabled it to make plans for a new national
office. The following year, 1976, with additional grants from the Clark
Foundation, NSVP opened a national office with an executive director
and a small staff in Alexandria, Virginia.
There were other developments in school volunteerism in this period.
In 1970, the Office of Education, then part of the U.S. Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare, Heated an Office of Volunteers in Educa
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8
VOLUNTEERS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
tion in the Bureau of Education Professions [Development. The creation of
this volunteer office was sparked in part by the surprising national re-
sponse to a speech by Commissioner of Education James Allen describing
a concept called "Right to Read," which was to have a strong volunteer
component. A corps of energetic supporters of Right to Read, many of
them volunteers, staffed the office in its first months, helping to answer
the large volume of mail generated by Allen's proposal.
The Office of Volunteers in Education began with modest funding of
$100,000 from three vocational education programs; the office eventually
received almost $1 million from several other federal education programs.
During its 2-year life, it supported programs to train school volunteer co-
ordinators at the Washington Technical Institute in the District of Colum-
bia and in Des Moines, Iowa, and convened a number of conferences. In
addition, the office encouraged the states to set up contacts for volunteer
programs. However, this office was only a very small operation, and
after 2 years it was eliminated during a reorganization of the Office of
Education.
That same year, 1972, the Institute for Development of Educational Ac-
tivities, Inc. (IDEA), an affiliate of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation,
convened a national seminar in Melbourne, Florida, to ascertain the status
of volunteers in the matter of teaching and learning as well as to deter-
mine the roadblocks to their expanded use. A report on the seminar
characterized school volunteerism as a "proliferating activity" and stressed
that the volunteer movement in education is a true grass-roots phenome-
non at the time (Institute for Development of Educational Activities, Inc.,
[IDEA], 1972).
Most of the people attending the seminar were coordinators of local
school volunteer programs; they came from San Francisco, California;
Winnetka, Illinois; Boston, Massachusetts; New Orleans, Louisiana; Los
Angeles, California; Englewood, New Jersey; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Kansas
City, Missouri; Houston, Texas; Worcester, Massachusetts; and the state
of New Hampshire. Also present were the vice-president for education of
the National Association of Manufacturers and representatives of several
community colleges, the American Red Cross, and the National Center for
Voluntary Action in Washington, D.C.
Seminar attendees confined themselves to discussing volunteers as di-
rect participants in the education process. The report (IDEA, 1972) on the
seminar gives considerable attention to volunteers as a way of reducing
the ratio of students to adults in classrooms and a way of giving students
individual, one-to-one attention. In providing services such as tutoring to
students in need of help, volunteers might really be "teaching," the report
noted, though conference attendees acknowledged that the word "rein-
forcing" is more palatable to professional educators.
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ORGANIZED SCHOOL VOLUNTEERISM IN THE U.S.
9
The conferees noted that volunteer programs sometimes started as the
idea of a superintendent or school board member or as a small effort put
together by a teacher or principal; more often, dedicated groups have to
demonstrate and justify the program before they can get the institutional
interest and backing. Major roadblocks to school volunteer programs
were school administrators, shy and insecure teachers, and teacher un-
ions. The report laid a great deal of the blame and responsibility for
teachers' fear of volunteers at the door of teacher-training institutions,
which do not enlighten the novice teacher that anyone else in the commu
nity could possibly be of any help.
Participants in the 1972 seminar cited the need for:
an independent national organization In order to give cohesiveness to the multih~-
dinous programs proliferating at the local level.... We need to have some kind of
dissemination of information so that others will know what is going on, where
things are happening, where new developments are taking place, and how a group
of volunteers can improve their own program.... The volunteer effort needs an
agency for dissemination, technical assistance, some kind of regular moral and,
possibly, financial support. This does not mean government support, as the pro-
gram will be far stronger if it is nongovernmental in nature.
During the 1970s and continuing in the 198Os, school volunteer pro-
grams sprang up in many towns and cities around the country, often
spontaneously, sparked by interest and enthusiasm on the part of an indi-
vidual parent, teacher, or school principal. The national organization
provided support to the emerging programs in the form of conferences,
newsletters, and training manuals and other materials.
In some communities, school desegregation spurred the volunteer move-
ment. During the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, school systems,
first in the South and then in the North, faced new problems of pupil and
teacher assignment, busing, and curriculum improvement as the result of
voluntary or court-ordered desegregation plans. In some cities, parents
and other volunteers rallied to prove the worth of public schools by offer-
ing their services in a variety of roles, including classroom support and
public relations.
The growing community schools movement was also a stimulus to
volunteerism. "Community education," generally defined as opening
schools to a variety of community activities, encouraged community
members to think of themselves as participants in the education process,
and many became volunteers in the schools.
But nothing focused attention on education more than a series of criti-
cal reports that began in 1983 with publication of the U.S. Department of
Education's A Nation at Risk, which noted many deficiencies in the educa-
tion children were receiving in the United States. The effect of this and a
series of other critiques was two-way: citizens became more interested in
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10
VOLUNTEERS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
what schools were doing, and educators looked for ways to bring allies
into the schools, to help with services and to bolster community support.
In 1988, NSVP reported that school volunteer programs were active in
all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories.
One of the major initiatives to emerge from the heightened public aware-
ness of education and education-related problems in the 1980s was a vari-
ety of cooperative arrangements between schools and businesses or other
community agencies, often in the form of partnerships or school adop-
tions, aimed at improving the quality of education and better preparing
students to compete as workers in a world economy. In 1988, NSVP
merged with the National Symposium on Partnerships in Education to
form the National Association of Partners in Education.
Two other organizations have made major contributions to volunteer-
ism in schools. One is the national PTA, founded in 1897 as the National
Congress of Mothers, with the threefold purpose of educating and involv-
ing parents in better rearing their own children, providing needed serv-
ices to all children, and strengthening support for public education. Cur-
rently, with 6.5 million members, the national PTA calls itself the largest
voluntary organization in the United States. Its members, predominantly
but not exclusively parents of school children, are committed to improv-
ing the lives and education of all children, not just their own, through
service and advocacy. In many schools, the local PTA is the major source
of school volunteers. PTAs also support schools through fund raising and
contribution of equipment and facilities.
Another organization that has played a significant role in school volun-
teerism is the Junior League, a national organization of women committed
to community service. Local leagues are grouped in an umbrella Associa-
tion of Junior Leagues headquartered in New York City. Since its incep-
tion in 1921, the league has been active in education. Junior leaguers
work as volunteers in many schools, and the league has initiated and
financially supported many volunteer activities. A major contribution of
the league has been the development of education curricula specifically
designed to use volunteers in a variety of school activities, including en-
richment for gifted and talented children, aid in improving reading and
other skills for disadvantaged youngsters, and supplementary programs
in science, mathematics, and reading.
Local junior leagues have autonomy to develop volunteer activities re-
sponsive to the needs of their local schools. The Association of Junior
Leagues provides technical support and assistance to local leagues and
has developed national programs that use volunteers to address a range
of education-related problems, including drug abuse and teenage preg-
nancy.
This brief account of the development of organized school volunteer
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ORGANIZED SCHOOL VOLUNTEERISM IN THE U.S.
11
ism in the United States is necessarily incomplete. It does not include the
varied experiences of school districts around the country that were devel-
oping volunteer programs at the time the events recorded here occurred.
It does not attempt to relate the school volunteer movement to other his-
torical developments) such as the enactment of federal education legisla-
tion, or increased acceptance by teacher unions of paid auxiliary aides in
classrooms. Nor does it attempt to look at school volunteerism in the
context of other major developments, such as the pressures on educators
in recent years to welcome community involvement in schools as a means
of school improvement or public relations. The varied experiences of
school districts around the country developing volunteer programs at the
time the events recorded here were occurring should also be part of any
history of the use of volunteers in schools. Some of these experiences are
described in the chapter on exemplary volunteer programs, but these also
are only part of the story. This brief synopsis is intended to provide some
context for understanding the development of organized school volun-
teers programs in the United States; the comprehensive history is yet to be
written.
REFERENCE
Institute for Development of Education Activities, Inc. (IDEA)
1972 Expanding Volunteers in Teching and Learning Programs. Dayton, Ohio: Institute
for Development of Educational Activities, Inc.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
volunteer programs
