We are using the 2 hour power idea asking teachers to commit to 2 hours of meetings. Some of them offered to make a monetary donation. We do accept bribes. For every adult commitment to 2 hours, including teachers, that class gets a point toward a pizza party contest. We let non-classroom teachers sponsor a student of their choice for the party and will invite them if that class wins. We also let teachers know that the chances of PTO approving any requests they make is greatly enhanced by their meeting attendance.

I'm not a teacher, but I am up at our school A LOT - like many of you, I'm sure

I would never ask our teachers to be at the school more than they already are - we communicate important info throuh our principal, memos in boxes and e-mails. We NEVER expect our teachers to be involved.

That being said, I will say that we have a high involvement level from our teachers, but I think it is becasue parent involvement is so high. We try very hard to make sure that each staff member feel appreciated, and we do A LOT for them. School has been in session for two weeks and we have already sorted all teachers construction paper by size and color, held a back to school breakfast, lamintaed, cut out, and deliverd teaching materials, shelved books in the library, hosted 2 dinners during our Open House, sent Kudos bars during the first week of school ... + lots more!

We continue to do these things for them each and every month of school and the help and extra effort that we receive from them is amazing!

We have two board positions called "Teacher Representative" We try to get one lower elementary and one upper elementary or a "Specials" teacher. This way we keep communication open which encourages the teachers to participate when they can.

I do not know if you really want teachers at the meeting or simply just teacher input. Our pto has been having trouble simply getting teacher input about events. We truly need there opinions and ideas to make this organization function to its fullest capacity. We have tried raffles of all kinds and we still cannot get any feedback from many of the staff. I began a specific email address for pto that I use to relay messages to the staff and it has helped boost the participation but we were still only at about 5%. We know the teachers are busy but when they cannot even send market day orders to the office we know there is a huge problem.
I have spoken to previous pto presidents and they say it was not much different when they were on the board.
We have now suggested to them to give us 2 hours throughout the year and in return they will receive a $100 stipend. This 2 hours can be through simple input or through actually coming to a meeting or event. It has helped tremendously. There are new faces at market day every month and the teachers really end up enjoying it. Several have said that they did not realize that giving just 30 mins. could be that much fun. They usually end up staying for 2 hours instead. They are even giving more than there 2 hours now.
We still have many members of our staff that do not participate and it does get discouraging but there are many parents that do not help out either. There are members of my pto board that get more discouraged than necessary sometimes and they do worry me with it but I continue to remind them that this is for our children. I hope that the reminder of that is enough to keep them on the board.
Needless to say this is a problem that will always be there. You will never get the number of volunteers you feel you should have from either parents or teachers but you never stop trying to get them!

That is a pretty restrictive rule to follow mssadams! It certainly would make it difficult to plan family events. Is this just a policy of your principal or a district policy? I think I would be delving deeper into the "why?" of the whole policy and see if something could get changed.

I am not sure how things are done at the school that you teach at and what the PTO is asking of you.

At our school, we have tried to plan things for evenings and Saturdays because a lot of our students have 2 parent working families or 1 parent families. That being said we have said, (though there is are only 4 parents on the board , 2 of us do work full-time) we are willing to take on the whole responsiblity of running and manning an event. We are not allowed to do things after school hours without teachers being present. Believe me we know that it is your free time and we appreciate that you have other responibilites. We have said it's ok we can do it we don't need the teachers to come or just a hand full maybe and we are told NO. If the teachers can't make it we can not run the event.

So, this may be why you are being asked to do so much extra. The PTO parents may really want or need to run the events and that is the only way it can be done.