FRANKLIN — The Franklin Parent Teacher Student Organization (FPTSO) is a “super boy band,” as I like to call it. It was a dream and goal I had for this city. I wanted to find the best way to combine the two parent groups I was president of, to make our goals that much easier for us to obtain. 

I had been mentioning this idea, to combine the Paul Smith School (PSS) PTA and the Franklin Middle School (FMS) PTO into one unified group, for over a year, and I also wanted to include students and the high school in this group. I was met with a lot of skepticism because we had been struggling to gain and maintain members, but I continued to push the idea.

By June of 2024, I finally had enough people willing to give it a try. I was elected President, and I set out to really make this into something people would want to join. As individual groups, we sometimes wouldn’t have enough members to make a quorum, so by joining the groups together, my hope was that we would always be able to make things happen for the kids. 

The group of people I was able to band together was ready to hit the ground running. It was amazing to see our growth, from between three to five members per group to nine  Board Members and a decent number of volunteers and members that brought us up to around 20. 

We are not your regular parent group. We include community members, grandparents, teachers, students, and yes, of course, parents. One of our main hopes for the FPTSO is to engage parents from as early as pre-K and get them involved in our students’ school lives. 

At grade four, students can become “junior members,” give us input via suggestions or ideas, and attend our general meetings with their parents. At grade seven, students can become ”student members,” which gives them voting privileges and allows them to help make decisions on the direction we take to support the schools. In my experience, giving students the opportunity to have a say in what goes on in their school gives them more buy-in to make a positive impact within the school.

Many people wonder what it is we do and how we raise money to do it. Some of our ongoing projects include upgrading the elementary playground to be inclusive, building an inclusive playground for the middle school, and helping our subgroup, the Franklin Hurricane Booster Organization, support extracurricular activities. We raise our money through various efforts, such as product fundraisers, hosting craft fairs, and slinging concessions at the SNHU arena.

We also support snack closets for students in need, fees for field trips so that no student is excluded due to finances, scholarships for seniors going into higher education, and so much more. We lend support to other nonprofits, such as the Franklin Animal Shelter and Twin Rivers food pantry, by hosting food/supply drives at our events. 

We set ourselves apart from other parent groups, as well, by not charging membership fees and instead giving incentives for accumulating volunteer hours. Our hours can be cashed in for our school spirit wear, which, for parents on a budget, can be a huge help.

I am very excited to see where the future takes us and how we can make a difference in our students’ lives. If you want to know more about our organization or are interested in attending a meeting, you can find us on Facebook.com/fptso where we post our meeting dates and times.