I also suggest you get an audit completed. If there was money misappropriated for personal expenses, you want to address that and try and get it back. Use whatever influence you have to in order to have the money returned.
Did you actually bounce checks or you just have bills that are unpaid and not enough money in the account to pay for them? An audit would turn up any deposits not made from events and any withdrawls not made that were acceptable. If the PTO was unaware of this, then there's a good chance that either the Treasurer couldn't balance a checkbook or something went seriously wrong.
Our PTO moved to our new school in debt, but we agreed that we would pay back our board of education if they built an extra playground for our kindergarden students. So we knew we had to do some extra fundraising in order to pay that debt. But if no one knew that this was going on and you had a budget, then an audit will turn up who was responsible
We, too, have a prek-1 school so I understand the challenges of rapid turnover. All the more reason to implement tight financial controls on your new account and PTO so this doesn't happen again. YOu'll need to review the books (i.e. audit) so you can be certain of the source of the debt before you can determine how to handle it. If you uncover misuse of funds/theft, you need to pursue it with the police, not just overlook it. Hopefully that's not the case. If the debt is really the PTO's, you'll probably need to work out a payment schedule with the vendor, which might mean your PTO can't do anything fun for a while, until the debt is paid off. Hang in there. You didn't cause the debt, but you can be the hero who erases it, and gets the PTO under control so this doesn't happen again. Good luck.
Help!
We are a new PTO board inheriting a major debt! We still haven't gotten the books (I opened a new account to start fresh with some money made at the end of the school year), but know of several thousand dollars still outstanding that the PTO is responsible for.
Does anyone have experience with someting like this? Is there any recourse or do we just chip away at the debt so the next Board can have a clean slate? I honestly don't know if it was just a combination of extremely unorganized bookkeeping and overspending OR (as gossip has it) some money going to personal use.
FYI: Our school is only Pre-K through 1st grade, so it does have a rapid change in parents and students because of the short time there...however, with the fundraisers, etc. last year I didn't anticipate starting in the red!
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
