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06/29/2016 08:30 AMWhen Michelle Spader and her husband Walt moved their family to North Haven in April 2005, it was just in time to enroll their oldest daughter in kindergarten at Green Acres Elementary School. Now, 11 years later, Michelle has spent more than a decade volunteering with the PTA.
“I’ll do anything so my kids and the kids in the community can have a good experience,” says Michelle. “I want our kids to experience as much as they can. I work full-time, so it’s really a juggling act, but I try to be present as much as I can. It’s an important part of my life.”
Michelle, an executive assistant at Anthem, is thankful to her boss for being understanding of the time she takes off to attend events at the school. Some of her favorite events she has helped with have included the Mother’s Day plant sale and creating gift baskets for the year-end picnic’s raffle. She also noted the PTA plans the school’s cultural arts events.
“It all comes down to what the town can’t provide due to limitations of funding, so we try to provide things the kids look forward to,” says Michelle. “I want my kids to have those memories. If I helped make that possible, then I did a good job. As a PTA member, you end up being there for every event, but not being able to enjoy them with your children because you’re manning a craft table, making sure there’s enough cookies or juice, and getting there early to set up and staying late to clean up.”
Over her 11 years with the PTA, two of them were spent as vice president of the PTA. While she says there was a lack in numbers as far as volunteers, there was a core group of people she knew were always ready to help.
Her youngest daughter just finished her time at Green Acres and Michelle has worked with several other parents in her daughter’s grade since the kids were in the school’s preschool program.
“We’ve been together since our children were three years old,” says Michelle, who was also a Girl Scout leader for four years. “The PTA has always been an important part of my life and from that has sprung many other things.”
In June 2013, Michelle was asked to serve on the North Haven Middle School Building Committee. The committee formed a year before the town voted for the project to proceed and since its formation, Michelle has “ate, slept, and breathed” it.
In the year before the project was approved, the committee worked with an architect on proposed ideas and discussed options. When it came to a vote, the Democratic Town Committee purchased signs that read “Vote Yes for North Haven Students” and Michelle spearheaded the effort to distribute the signs.
When she signed onto the project, she and the other committee members were unsure of the timeline of the project, but now she is seeing the committee’s efforts come to fruition just in time for her youngest to be a member of the first 6th-grade class at the new middle school.
“As it turns out, two members of that committee, myself and another, will have children entering the school as incoming 6th-graders, so it means even that much more to me because I’ll have a student that will get the benefits of this revamped school environment, which were so desperately needed,” says Michelle. “Anybody who had been in the school had seen how badly it needed to be renovated. Again, I just wanted the best for our North Haven families.”
The PTA also led Michelle to become a member of the Community Services Commission, which oversees the activities of the Community Services Department. The commission works to create standards, policies and guidelines for toy distribution at the holidays, food bank distributions, and fuel distribution through the many Community Service Department’s programs.
“It’s a great way have a pulse on the community service opportunities,” says Michelle, who has been a member of that commission for the past three years. “While we’ve always been involved with Project Graduation, we plan to get more involved as a couple members have kids who will be graduating in the next few years.”
Between Michelle’s full-time job, her volunteer work, and being a wife and mother, there isn’t much time for leisure activities, but Michelle enjoys gardening, reading, traveling, and spending time with extended family. While she doesn’t have much time for her hobbies, she wouldn’t change her commitment to her volunteer activities.
“Anybody who is able to give of themselves should—I live in the community and I like to have a strong voice in the community,” says Michelle. “I stand up at Board of Ed meetings when they change a policy or I think something needs to be changed, I try to help wherever and whenever I can.”
When she was growing up, Michelle saw her father and grandfathers give of themselves as members of the Knights of Columbus and the Fire Commission. She hopes that as her daughters see her and her husband giving and volunteering, they, too, will do the same.
Her older daughter has already begun volunteering with young softball players and through projects at the high school, where she will be a junior. Her younger daughter also enjoys attending events for Relay for Life or St. Baldricks and volunteering filling donation bags at the food pantry and more.
“Community service and civic mindedness have been ingrained in me and I took that as an important part of my life and I want my kids to do the same,” says Michelle. “My husband and I just hope they both get the importance that you’re fortunate to have a lot in your life and some aren’t as fortunate. We should do what we can to make their situations better.”