The Principal can have a vote, but only if she or he is a parent of a student in that school.

Friendly and frequent communication with the Principal and administration is critical, but Parent Group topics and issues should be dealt with by the Parent Group.

Looking at it another way: Does the PTO President get a vote or input on school policy issues? They have their business and we have ours. Both are operating with the safety and welfare of our students and school in mind.

I'm VP of the parent group at the High School, 1,600 students. We have one of the Assistant Principals as liaison and she attends each of our meetings, gives input and takes our concerns and issues back to the other administrators. The Principal has used our meetings to put out information on major policy changes in the school and also updates on construction and organization of the new HS that is being built. Our Principal and Assistant Principal do not get votes on our actions.

We have a very good relationship with our administrators but to me, giving the Principal voting authority would be giving away some of our power and responsibility.

Our Principal is the permanent Vice President of the PTO. We have a President-Elect, which basically does all the duties of VP. Our principal attends every meeting, shares ideas, and is a vital part of our Board.

In MA, all the "directors" of the organization have to be listed on a form filed with the Secretary of the Commonwealth. I think 25-30 is way too many, especially if you try to have a meeting with that many. Actually, we'd be very happy to get that many at our general meetings ... maybe you have a much larger school there in Texas?

We had this in place for an elementary school of 400-500 and a middle school of 900. For the middle school, there much fewer positions/committees so the Board wasn't as large.

But in both cases, the Board had the power - it made all the day to day decisions, especially regarding expenditures. We had only two general meeetings a year, one to approve the budget in the fall and one to elect officers in the Spring. So in our case, we wouldn't have felt comfortable with 4-5 people running the show completely to represent the opinions of 500.

In your case, you probably have financial issues voted on at a general meeting and the Board refers and recommends rather than having all the operational power.

As far as listing all the names on forms - we had that issue here as well, but the various governing bodies tended to have advice as to a subset to list rather than the whole set since none are compensated.

As long as your model works for you - that's what counts. Good luck.

Sounds like he gets the ultimate vote-veto power!
I would rather give him a single vote as a member of your board than give him veto power.

Our principal attends almost every meeting. He has veto power over any decisions made by PTO, but is careful to let us run our organization. I can't imagine that our principal would want to be involved in every vote. The details of organizing events, the paying of basic bills, etc... most decisions aren't that exciting - unless you are the chair in charge of that event. Our principal becomes much more interested and involved when discussing major purchases or major changes to our activities. In those areas we always get and value his oppinion - but not his vote.

Our district has 2 principals and a school superintendent. They are all briefed on what pto would like to do first and they then let us know if it is ok with the school. They do not want to vote on any final decision. They only want to be able to give their opinions as to whether it would be beneficial to the children or not. I would not give them power of voting for the same reason as president jim. Their vote would most likely alter that of a staff member whether intentionally or not.
Our principals and superintendent are very supportive and their opinions definitely play a huge part in our decision making process. It sounds like yours is too. Did you ever hear the phrase "Don't change what isn't broken"? I think it certainly applies to this situation.
Good luck!