Question: Official Leg to Stand on
Recently we've had new people showing up to meetings and that's great! However, they have been super aggressive in their questioning and in their way of treating myself and fellow officers like we have no common sense. I found out they are asking a PTO president from another school questions I would think they should ask me as it pertains to our school. On top of that, they have started an email campaign to the principal and staff, recruited others, talk bad about me, and I mean the list goes on. I sat down and spoke with the principal and explained I can handle attacks aimed at myself. I can own my weaknesses and mistakes but they aren't approaching this in a way that is productive and "hey, I miss these types of events. how can I and others help so we can have those again?" It's literally "We didn't reschedule the Winter Festival because of illness, we rescheduled because you weren't prepared." Umm no, literally it was a spike in illnesses. Was I completely prepared? No, there were a few areas I had slacked on but had we knew there was no rescheduling and hadn't heard murmurs of concerns over illness, it would have been done. Anyway, the level of aggression and the full blown smear campaign, I'm at a loss. They have never come to me or anyone else and listed in any form their complaints or grudges. Never asked us in an truly curious, "I want to understand how this works so I can better help." way. Just constant belittlement and just complete toxic behavior! I went to the principal with this because I want to diffuse this. I want to head this off and turn it around before it gets huge. Because if it runs unchecked, then everyone is putting time and focus on useless drama and not what our number one focus is and should be, our students and staff. So I'm cutting to the chase. I hear pto officers talk all the time about members that are a pain to deal with (usually other officers and sometimes principals/staff) but they seem to have to just deal. Now due to state and district guidelines we can't just "kick them out" so to speak (nor would I want to. it's a democracy and they do have some great ideas) but if our meetings are going to be spent with attacks and pettiness, to me that violates our mission statement. Is there anyway to reprimand them, discourage this behavior in some official manner like "hey, everyone gets one warning on their attitude. if you are called out for being aggressive and completely counterproductive to what our purpose is, you'll be asked to leave for the rest of this meeting." By that I don't mean they can't call people out on behavior or have them answer for their mistakes or whatever, but they won't be allowed to do so in a way that creates a negative environment, causes someone to feel attacked or "ganged up on" or fosters any type of unproductive attitude or draws us away from working as a team and finding solutions and being examples to our students. The level of toxicity is poison and the principal and I have spoken on this and we don't want that near the kids. How can we try to handle this or at least diffuse it in some manner? Do we have any official ground to stand on in some way?
Asked by Anonymous