
I never thought I would be going to school with my kids.
The summer before my oldest daughter started kindergarten, I'd been warned at our neighborhood playground: "Stay away from those PTA moms. Once they get you in their clutches, they'll never let you go."
But the school community was new to us, so a few weeks in, I hosted an afternoon tea at my house so we could get to know the kindergarten girls and their mothers. Not long afterward, I had a playground conversation with a Mexican-American father of a fifth-grader, who admitted that he did not feel like a part of the community. Before I knew it, I had an organized an international potluck to replace the school's annual Harvest potluck, and created a multi-cultural committee.
I served as our PTA's first vice president of outreach. I was a member of the school's leadership team and served as a reading tutor. I competed for and won city and county grants to create a tile-mosaic reader board, renovate the playground and install an environmental rain garden.
I became one of those PTA moms.
Though it's clear I was (over)compensating for my pent-up career ambitions, my years of volunteerism were personally and professionally satisfying. And I'm happy to report that, in at least one instance, I broke the stereotype.
"You’re not a typical PTA mom," a refreshingly frank parent, originally from the South, told me. "You don’t have a stick up your ***."
I don't know if the expression "A little knowledge goes a long way" is appropriate, but here's what happened: The more I started caring about my kids' school — not just making sure my children were thriving academically and socially, but also that their teachers and administrators were well supported — the more I started caring about learning environments beyond our school, including those where the picture wasn't so rosy.
I began subscribing to newsletters from local education-advocacy groups. The information they provided was useful, but I had trouble distinguishing one group from another. I suspected I wasn't the only busy parent who was confused.
So I wrote an article about them. One article led to another; one publication led to another. And thus, I became an education reporter.
I saw that the education debates raging in my hometown of Seattle are the same debates being played out nationally. I started following national education journals and advocacy groups. It was only a matter of time before I began following what was happening with education internationally.

While alcohol and marijuana are by far the most popular substances used by youth who choose to get high, there is concern about increases in the number of young people turning to heroin.
Patti Skelton-McGougan is Executive Director of 
