Hi FTK -

I think you guys are focusing on the wrong things. Honestly.

From what we know (your side), things are completely off the rails when it comes to parent groups and involvement at your school.

To me, this parent's motion or the exact procedure for disbanding are secondary to the larger, systemic issues at your school. Focus should be there.

If you and your fellow leaders truly want to throw your hands up, buy a bunch of stuff for your school, donate it and then resign. You'll be out, there will be no money in the budget, and the school/kids will have resources. If there's no money and no officers, then who cares whether the next set of leaders a) starts a wholly new group; or b) steps in to run "your" group? That's just a technicality/semantics.

If you want to make change at your school, then everybody needs to get off the "little stuff" (relatively) and focus on the required basics like communication and shared goals (or even working with district superiors so that they know there's a loony principal on the loose, if that's really the case).

Tim

what about the motion made by the parent? Does it have to be recognized by the board? This is all new to us since we have never had this problem before. Another issue that concerns us is that the principal called in parents to count fundraiser money, no board member was called, she left the parents to count themselves,none of which are board members and if I remmeber correctly not pto members either. The deposit slip was made by me and the money left in the care of the principal.The deposit was to be made the following day by me and another parent after we recounted the money, the principal took it upon herself to deposit the money, then told me that afternoon it was over $2000.00 short. After reviewing all our deposits we have found that her deposit was not put into our checking out, but placed in another account, which we have not found yet. How can we protect ourselves from this missing money?

I think the issue here is you did not follow your own bylaws when holding your executive board meeting and so any vote taken there is not legal. Doesn't matter what happened after that. Someone who knows more about all this please correct me if I am wrong.

We had a pto meeting last night at which as the pto board we wanted to dissolve, our principal never attended the meeting, so we went ahead with the vote, when we went into our general meeting we informed the parents of our plans, at this time a parent brought up our bylaws, which actually state that the exec. meeting is to take place 1 week prior to the general, we have never in 3 years done that it has always taken place the same night, the parent motioned to dissolve the board,not the pto, it was seconded. Can a parent motion this? there is a lot of bad blood between the pto and the principal, we were ambushed by a pta rep at out Oct. meeting, setup by the princ., she has slandered the pto to parents saying we are misusing fund and the latest is we are stealing money.I want to make sure that what happened is legal,when we planned to dissolve our intention was to allocate our assests from our fundraiser throughout the school.
Who can make a motion at general meeting? Does the board have any say in the decision that the parents made? Since we were basically ousted how do we hadle turning over everything to the new board?Any help in greatly needed, I want everything done legally.

If they were a 501 then it should be spelled out in the bylaws. If they werent it may have been stated before the ousting what the money would go for. When our old group left funds it was clearly marked for playground equipment. If it wasn't earmarked then I would say it belongs to the school unless your principal or disrict feels different

chally - I notice your use of the word "ousted" so I wonder if there are negative feelings driving the decision. My feeling is that the funds were raised due to community involvement and those funds should benefit that community. The right thing to do would be to transfer the funds.

However, if there is bad blood, the old group may follow the IRS guideline but choose another 501(c)(3) to donate to. That'd be a snotty thing to do but perhaps that's why they were ousted to begin with.

It would be tough to build from scratch and to rebuild the community's trust but maybe a clean slate is better. Unless, of course, you're talking about thousands of dollars. Then I'd fight to the very end!!!!