A Letter from the Founding Mom

Welcome Parents,

My name is Aparna Vashisht-Rota. I am a parent and the founding mom of Parentella. I wanted to let you know a little about me, and why I started this site.

I was given a parent directory for the 2007-2008 at my son's school. I looked at this directory and found that I had never used the parent directory and no one new ever called me. I met parents through school events or parents of my son's friends. Often, these parents' children weren't in my son's class. If I had a specific question about my son's class or homework, I found myself at a loss.

The other challenge that I found is that as each year the classrooms change, your child has new classmates. The groups are temporal and begin at square one each school year. The experience gained during each year is tremendous. Parents accumulate this knowledge and move with their children to the next grade. There is so much information that the parents in the current grade year could pass on to the incoming class. Enabling parents to share information easily, communicate on their own time, and providing a platform for busy parents. Creating a simple way to connect and be engaged became the driving force for Parentella. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that Parentella must exist.

I started looking around for websites that allowed me to form groups around the classrooms. I also started gathering feedback from parents to see whether they also faced the same challenges. In fact, one of the moms told me that she never calls anyone as she felt that she would impose on other parents.

As parents, we have a lot of demands on our time. It is increasingly harder to meet other parents and build a support group to ask questions such as:

• What is a particular school like?
• Who else attends the same school? Class?
• What should I do to prepare my child for a new grade?
• Whom can I talk to whose child has attended a school before mine?
• What extracurricular activities are available in my area?

Most importantly, What happened at the school during the day or a particular week? I know when I ask my son what he did at school and how his day was, I have to probe and often get 1-2 word responses. Here is a brief re-enactment:

Me: How was your day?

My son: Fine

Me: What did you do today?

My son: The usual.

Some days are better than others and those days I get good information. Those days, I would love to share that information with other parents to get a complete picture. Most parents are already online. Therefore, it seemed like a good idea to form Parentella.com. The main purpose of Parentella.com will be to connect parents whose kids are in grades K-12 by school, community, and nationwide.

We will be constantly working to make Parentella.com better every day. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

Thanks for joining Parentella and best wishes to you and yours,

Aparna Vashisht-Rota