If by "farming emails" you mean that it is illegal for the school to give the PTO (or any organization) contact info that parents have given the school expressly for the school's use, that is the case in our district as well. As a result, our PTO has to gather contact information from parents directly for our use.

Fortunately, our school allows us to send the forms home in the student's backpacks and the teachers to collect the completed forms that come back to give us.

From there, the PTO produces the school's student directory and loads the email addresses into our email system for our weekly general announcements.

Hi
I'm not sure what "farm emails" means. We obtained a "gmail.com" email address for our parent group as we needed an email address for the Paypal non-profit account we opened in order to obtain sales through the website. So although we still had our email addresses for particular offices/committees that parents might need to contact - like membership, volunteer coordinator, ect our main email address we posted was our gmail.com one. We just had to designate someone to be in charge of checking it daily.
When we posted the "Parent Express" sign up we decided to utilize it as not only for parent sign ups to use for announcements.....but we are using it as our primary avenue to contact volunteers for particular volunteer needs that come along. Our rationale we told the principal was that phone calls take too much time and there is the very likely possibility that we might not call all the parents on the lists and our concern was not leaving any parent that signed up to volunteer feeling left out and not included.
As far as it being illegal, I'm sure each state has it's own laws and it could possibly be just the school district or a particular school rule. I hope some of this helps.

Cindy,
Thanks for your reply.

Yes, all of the school's in our District have been maintaining our own accounts for a couple of years now. We recently were given remote access capability (after much pushing...) which is really convenient and allows us to stay up to date. I'm curious as to the District's claim that they aren't allowed "by law" to farm emails of parents. I know there are a lot of PTO's out there doing collecting the info and keeping the parents informed..... is that illegal? Who determines that?

thanks so much!

The quick answer to your question is unfortunately yes. A school district can do what they wish with their funded website. I have a suggestion. The last 2 schools I've been involved with the parent groups had the same issues you did. I contated the webmaster of our school as each school in the district had it's own pages. When I met with them I discussed what we needed and wanted on the school pages. What I learned was that the webmaster was just too busy to do the pages on the school site or to mess with it. I asked if I could be the web person for our PTO and learn how to do this. I took scrupulous notes, was given a password access for just our pages. I was shown how to set them up and then I went home and furiously worked on them. After the initial approval of our set up and content, I had free reign to update as needed for the rest of the year. Hopefully, you can meet with your school's web person and come to a working agreement. If not OR after some time of trying to work with the school web person it just isn't working for your group then yes you will need to have your own website. This is something I have no experience with but I know the folks on these message boards will have some excellant advise for you.
I will say one thing to try either way you go......check out the PTO Today "Parent Express" email system. We started with it this year and it's been wonderful for us. Good luck!

Hello,
I am a parent and PTO member and my question is what rights (if any) does a PTO have when it comes to communicating events or creating a database to be used solely for communicating PTO events and news?
I am in a school district that recently decided to "go green" by forcing parents to access the new District website for all information vs the traditional "backpack mail" way of communicating. That's not the problem at all. The issue is that the individual PTO's of these schools have been forced to disseminate information to parents but at the discretion of the District. Each of the PTO's except for one that was ahead of it's time, has their information on the District website and therefore at the mercy of the school in regards to update and content. With current information being so easily accessible to the world, is it possible for the District to "step on the communication hose"? For example, if the PTO is hold a book fair fundraiser and wants to keep parents up to date on their child's schedule to the fair or a link to a teacher's wish list - this information can only be accessed through the District site and that's when and if they update the PTO web page.

Again, does a school district have jurisdiction over what the PTO can post on their site? If so, then can the PTO create their own website with their own domain name and have the District just link to the PTO site? Thereby the PTO's would be legally responsible for their own content and not the District.

any help is greatly appreciated!

a very frustrated mom