Hi everyone! Longtime reader, and this seemed like a good place to get an outside opinion on some drama at my son’s school.
I’m an American immigrant to France and my son, aged 3, started school this year. The public schools here aren’t great, so we decided to put him in a private school that opened just last year. While it was too new to have an established reputation yet, they were promoting themselves as bilingual (French/English), Montessori, a really good teacher-student ratio, etc. My parents are helping us pay for it.
Anyways, I was invited by the principal to be on the school APE (that’s French for PTA, the committee for the school’s parents). I thought it was odd that it wasn’t an elected position, but maybe they didn’t have the time to organize elections among the parents this year.
As the semester rolled out, I wasn’t 100% happy (particularly with how much English the kids were getting and with the highly disorganized communication style of the school), but I let a lot of things slide because my son seems happy there. Plus, any ambitious new project is going to have wrinkles to iron out! I spent a lot of personal money on books to build up the school library, I helped with an after-school club, and the PTA organized a fundraiser to pay for field trips.
Well, at our meeting last Friday, we told the school principal and secretary that some of the parents had raised concerns with us. Most of them had to do with poor communication on the part of the school, some issues with uniforms–nothing major. For each point, we tried suggesting possible solutions. But they got really defensive and started saying that the parents needed to have more confidence in them, that the kids were lucky to be at a school like this, that everyone was already working day and night to make sure the school was a success, etc. The meeting went over time as we tried to find a positive note to end on.
The next day we all got a message saying that while our voices "counted," they had decided to dissolve the current PTA and hold elections for a new PTA starting in 2026 so that the parents could judge the "legitimacy" of our complaints. They also said they would be creating a charter for the PTA, the implication being that we were out of our lane. Finally, the message also said that we hadn’t done our jobs because the meeting was supposed to be about the last fundraiser. No plan for the meeting was ever communicated to us, and we handled all relevant business from the fundraiser within the first ten minutes.
We all felt insulted. At first I wondered if I was missing some obvious context, being a foreigner here, but the other parents involved confirmed my impression: We seem to have been fired for telling the administration that the parents weren’t completely happy with everything.
That said, I am wondering if we should have handled it better. Were we TAs?
YTA for saying that the French public school system isn’t “great”. I know, because that’s where my son got his primary education, that it is superior to the public school system in North America.
Not the asshole for thinking that the private school administration is acting like a bunch of petty autocrats. Welcome to France, where bureaucrats always think they know best, and parental involvement is generally just for show.
Whooo boy. So much to unpack here.
First kid, I presume?
Gotta be. This is ridiculous
Right? And the whole thinking they know better than professional educators, the stereotypical ugly American acting?
Ick.
I’m the only American on the PTA, or in the school. These were other parents’ complaints, not mine. And I didn’t want to go into details about what the parents are complaining about, but that means you honestly have no idea if they’re legit or not.
Well that’s on you for not providing enough information.
Cultural mismatch. I have co-workers who moved to US from France and one of the things they are always complaining about is how much parental involvement is expected in the schools. “Why don’t these people just do their jobs?” And these are loving parents with high expectations for their kids.
The US expectations that schools are supposed to jump when parents complain is not how the rest of the world does it. And their schools tend to be better. Teachers expect to be treated as professionals who know how to do their jobs.
Yes. France is not the US. It is a new school. I think that the outcome is actually great. Admin learned that they should put a fence around the PTA.
I wondered if that was it, but all the other parents on the committee are French and they all thought it was reasonable. Plus, I looked at another school’s website, and it explicitly stated that their PTA is there in part to escalate parental complaints to the administration…
The teachers all seem excellent; it’s the school administrators who are involved in this issue.
Hoo YTA. French public schools are some of the best, private schools are seen as kind-of weird and usually exclusively religious here — and parents are expected to listen to the professionals
YTA for making me want to defend the French
They’re right that the PTA should have a charter. In the UK PTAs have a constitution that defines their roles, responsibilities, processes, etc. – everyone has clear shared goals and knows exactly which areas the committee is required to cover. PTAs do not interfere with school operations outside of their constitution, because that is not their expertise and it’s unhelpful to the running of the school. That is what the teachers and other school employees are paid to do.