We offer babysitters! We pay! We send home a notice with our 7&8 graders if they babysit for us (parent ok) we deposit the money toward their class trips....It's a great way for them to make extra money and the parents like it too....The parents drop off the 7&8
graders and pick them up in an hour ....It's great....
We offer babysitting, at PTO's expense-but free to the parents, at every meeting and we try to offer it at every event that requires volunteers. We also just bought a rubbermaid trunk that we're filling with donated items for a PTO toy box that will be used whenever we offer babysitting. It would be a shame to loose some potentially great volunteers because they couldn't bring their kids......
We've seen a great increase in the new people that can now come help because we offer babysitting.......
We experimented with having "something" for the little ones at each meeting like an open gym or a storyteller. Worked fine for a while, but we needed to know numbers in order to reserve the right kind of events, and it became a big production.
Now we alternate a bit. Babysitting every other meeting and we try to have an event of some sort planned with chaperones at several other meetings a year.
