Question: PTO Funds

I am PTO President at our very small school- 190 students. For the past two years, we have built up our PTO to be very successful and we are proud to have a good relationship with our Principal. Until recently. This year, we allocated funds to be set aside for each classroom to be used for field trips, transportation, etc. It was agreed on by or PTO and the Principal. We made a PTO newsletter to be sent out to parents and included in it our plans for the PTO money, not amounts, just telling them about the class accounts. After all, parents helped raise ALL of that money. Our Principal thinks we are giving out too much information to parents and wants to run it by the Building Committee. The Committee does not come to our PTO meetings and we are not allowed to attend their meetings or apparently even know who is on the committee. We have let her run things by them before, for example school parties, so that we can continue to work together as a team but I feel this is going too far. We have our own bank account and our Principal is not a co-signer on it, so I believe this means we are a separate entity? Our PTO is an open book and we want parents to feel involved, not keep things from them. HELP!!

Asked by Anonymous

Answers:

Community Advice

Sabrina Z writes:
That raises a lot of red flags for me. If you're not allowed to know who's on that "Building Committee" ... that sounds fishy right there. If parents come to your meetings and you're going thru the Agenda for the meeting ... usually the second or third thing on it is "Treasurers statement" which means "account balance". So right there, you're already sharing how much money you have in your PTO account ... it's public knowledge. It sounds like something more is going on if the Principal is so concerned about parents knowing how much money the PTO has.