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The Mountain View Whisman School District is planning to loosen its requirements for parents and other community members to volunteer on campuses, although some parents want to see the rules relaxed even further.
Starting next school year, Mountain View Whisman plans to raise the threshold at which it considers someone to be a “regular” volunteer, with the goal of allowing more people to help out at local schools without having to go through a substantial approval process.
District staff presented the plans to the school board at a Feb. 13 meeting. After hearing from community members who wanted the requirements simplified even more, administrators now intend to present additional updates to the school board next week.
Mountain View Whisman requires its regular volunteers to complete a series of steps, including taking a training on child abuse identification and reporting, getting fingerprinted, and providing documentation that they don’t have tuberculosis.
Currently, any adult who volunteers on campus more than three times in a school year or who attends an overnight field trip is considered a regular volunteer. The district plans to transition to defining regular volunteers as those who put in more than 16 hours in a month or 32 hours in a school year, as well as those chaperoning overnight trips.
This school year, the district approved 833 regular volunteers, based on data through January. According to district officials, 370 of those volunteers would not yet have hit the “regular” cutoff under the new definition. Those below the cutoff are considered “infrequent” volunteers and only have to show a valid ID to help out on campus.
Chief Human Relations Officer Tara Vikjord told the school board on Feb. 13 that the district appreciates all the important work that volunteers do, but also stressed that the approval system is meant to keep students safe.
“I hope that (this) update helps our volunteers to be able to spend more time with us and with our children, doing all of the great things that they do,” Vikjord said, in reference to raising the hours threshold to be a regular volunteer.
The item came before the board for discussion, not a vote, and the plan is for the changes to be a staff-level decision.
At the Feb. 13 meeting, five community members addressed the board, and generally advocated for easing restrictions so that it’s easier to volunteer. Aytek Celik told board members that their goal should be to encourage volunteers to be in schools.
“That’s what we should focus on, because we want to focus on student learning and achievement,” Celik said. “You’re talking about something that’s doing the opposite of that.”
Parents have also circulated a petition calling to reduce how often regular volunteers need to complete training for reporting child abuse. The district currently requires it annually.
District staff now intend to present plans to further streamline the volunteer process at a March 6 school board meeting, including reducing the mandated reporter training requirement for regular volunteers to be every other year, Vikjord told the Voice.
“We’ve heard from parents that annual training is time consuming and believe that every other year training balances safety with reducing obstacles for parents,” Vikjord wrote in an email.
The district also plans to switch to a provider that offers a free 60-minute version of the training, Vikjord said. The district currently uses a training that takes two hours and costs $7.99, although parents are also given the option to take the training for free at the district office.
Changing the definition of a “regular” volunteer
By switching its definition of a regular volunteer, Vikjord told the board that the district would be aligning with California Assembly Bill 506, which the governor signed in 2021.
The law requires a “regular volunteer” with a “youth service organization” to complete training in identifying and reporting child abuse and neglect. Regular volunteers are defined as adults who directly interact with or supervise children for more than 16 hours per month or 32 hours per year.
Vikjord told the board that the district believes it would be considered a youth service organization under the statute’s definition, and therefore needs to abide by the training requirements. In contrast, some parents have argued that school districts wouldn’t fall within the definition.
Another topic Vikjord addressed was the time that it takes to process regular volunteers. At the start of the school year, the district gets a lot of requests to become a volunteer, but that’s also the time when the HR department is handling a lot of staff hiring and onboarding, Vikjord said.
This school year, the district approved 186 regular volunteers in August, 221 in September and 369 in October. Substantially smaller numbers were approved in the following months.
Under the new system, volunteers will still have the option to complete the process to become a regular volunteer at the start of the year, but will also be able to start as an infrequent volunteer, Vikjord said. Once they’ve completed 12 volunteer hours in a given month or a total of 25 hours, Vikjord said they would be asked to go through the process to become a regular volunteer, so that there is time to process their application.
The impact of the changes is likely to differ by school site, because some schools have far more volunteers than others. Over 40% of the district’s regular volunteers this school year are working at Stevenson Elementary School, according to data presented to the school board. Stevenson is a choice school that puts a particular emphasis on parent participation. The rest of the district’s schools range from 78 volunteers at Imai Elementary School to 9 at Castro Elementary School.
Less than 10 years ago you just had to have a TB test. And provide your DMV record if you were driving on a field trip. You didn’t need fingerprints because you weren’t allowed to be alone with students.
No training is bad. Too much training is bad. Seems like a good middle ground.
Wow. I find this hard to believe. Decades ago I received the volunteer of the Year award at Slater school. Volunteering has been my life. And the idea that the standards are lowered to allow predators and sick people to come in and volunteer is absolutely disgusting. The bar needs to be set high for people to come into a classroom and interact with children. I don’t want unvetted unvaccinated predatory people allowed to volunteer in the classroom and this is what this opens it up to be. Every weirdo psycho pervert is going to go! Yay! I can come and volunteer in a classroom now. This is disgusting
Six years ago I offered to start a chess club at Crittenden. The principal wouldn’t let me do it before school on the late-start day because there had to be a credentialed teacher in the room, and all the teachers were busy then. She offered that I could leave work in the middle of the day to do an after-school club, which was completely inconvenient. Two parent volunteers should be enough to supervise a club. Parents aren’t any less trustworthy than teachers. A good enrichment opportunity went down the drain.
Tell that to all the victims districts have had to pay out.
My opinion is too many are commenting about this topic without even understanding the bulk of the volunteers today in the district. The majority are in Stevenson, almost all volunteer in the classroom a few hours per week while the teacher is in the classroom or assist with various programs where a teacher is present. Showing a drivers license in these situations is completely fine by me, ALL of them that do this have students in the school!
These parents will be on the campus regardless of whether they volunteer or not; my wife does the volunteering while I pickup my children. I’m more on the campus than her, yet she has to do all this training, fingerprinting and such. Then there is the data collected, its likely accessible my many more than it should be, bringing up privacy concerns. Comments seem more like the rise of Karen vs. common sense.