Before school started, one of our board members went to a staff meeting. She gave every Classroom and Specials Teacher a hand stamped Welcome Back To School cards that had a $20.00 gift card to our local United Arts and Education store (10% off of our order that was $500.00 or more). On our budget the line items reads: Teacher’s “Welcome Back to School†Classroom Gifts. It's important to remind everyone that the teachers are using this money for the children in their classrooms.
Regarding requests, our PTO provides teachers with a requst form. Our board meets the Friday prior to our monthly PTO meeting and reviews these request. I run the request by the principle prior to the board meeting if it's something out of the ordinary, as he is often able to provide the item with school money.
Our PTO is also going to make a suggestion box this year so that parents and teachers can make less formal requests - which gives our board more room to make decisions when we have extra money that has come in.
One school I was with had teachers accts. thru the pto & had to fill out a remibursement form, attach a receipt, then was remib. The school I am now with does it differntly. Any funds the pto gives to the teachers goes into their teacher activity acct. set up thru the board office, who then disburses the funds & board office monitors their spending.
Due to IRS recommendations, we also switched from giving the money outright, to reimbursing based on receipts. Even though the teachers must turn in receipts that total at least their allocation ($90 this year), we never review the receipts. We just file them away. No one has complained. We remind the teachers just before summer and twice again during the year. Amazingly, there are always a couple of teachers who never submit their receipts, so they forego their money.
We don't have a grant program. If a teacher wants money from the PTO for a special program, s/he must go through the principal. We respect his decisions and let him be the fall guy if he says No to a teacher. The PTO budgets a certain amount of money that the principal has discretion over so he can approve teacher requests if he wants, up to our budgeted amount. We don't vote to approve these requests since the money has been allocated in our approved annual budget.
We're lucky to have quite a few teachers who are also parents in our school. Maybe that's the motivation, maybe it's principal encouragement, or maybe it's a good relationship, but we usually have about 3 teachers at each PTO meeting (which we consider good). We don't fret about direct teacher involvement. In alot of ways, we view them as our customers, not our workers.
Just to clarify- we are not withholding the money to try to get the teachers to come to meetings. It is just a reason for us to be frustrated over them getting angry with us.
The decision to stop the "gifts" was made because we thought the money should be more accounted for.....
thanks for any thoughs on the matter!
We went from offering discretionary funds in cash-old practices from before my time-to asking for receipts to be submitted and a check cut at that point for the same amount as the previous year. So basically, if they really spent the money on what it was intended for, they shouldn't have a problem showing it, but we did give them notice during the summer so they could collect their receipts. So far, only 16 of 58 have asked for their money. This is money we don't vote on. They know how much they are entitled to if they spend it and when they show their proof, they get it.
Trying to get teachers to come to meetings by witholding funds won't get them to come, it will definately get them to not like you. We moved our meeting times and made them shorter and got more staff to come.
The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating-in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life. --Anne Morris
For the past two years, the PTO has given "gifts" of $100.00 to teachers at the beginning of each year. This year, the board wanted to replace it with "grant request forms" and boy are the teachers mad!!! They want the money, but the same teacher is the only one to show up to a meeting every month. We didn't like having 4300.00 of our budget our there and not really know what it was being used for. Also, now they can ask for more than 100.00 if they have an idea that will benefit the children in a great way. Any thoughts??? :
