Have a quick question regarding the approval of spending funds and a town's/school's involvement...
Recently our school was selected to participate in a national event this summer. To do so four families and the Principal would need to go on a trip for a couple of days. As a way to deal with expenses the PTO ran a fundraising event specifically for this involvement. We were able to raise the funds but there seems to be one minimal snag...
The Principal just explained to us that eveything has been approved by the town's School Committee, but they would not approve the spending of any of the "school's" funds (meaning the funds raised by the PTO) for the parents of the students. Meaning that we would need to pay for our own flights, though the hotel expenses would fall under the children.
In the end it all worked out as one of the parents had a mess of frequent flier miles and was willing to use them for this, but I'm still a bit confused about the statement made by the Principal, and I didnt want to make it an issue, as it didn't seem like it was going to be one.
So we are an independant non-profit PTO organization. We have Bylaws, and there is nothing in them regarding the School Committee's permission for expenses.
Per the school's rules we have to send in fundaraising approval requests for any fundraisers that we run throughout the year, but I always assumed that this was just to ensure that the town was aware of what we were doing, etc. Also we would of course have to get approval of any projects that we would want to run that would affect the school, such as the playground or say replacing the auditorium carpet.
So the question is, does a Principal have the right to control the way a PTO decides to spend their funds, and more importantly can a town's School Committee control how a PTO spends it's funds?
