after doing all the hard work and having storage reduced, and reduced and again downsized, we were told through the grapevine to go to a storage Rental Place and ask if they would donate a year of free storage! yeah right.

Well the President put her foot down and said we spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on all these things. Either we will notify the entire board it is going to be trashed and no longer will she be President and I step down or we get room. Sure enough we got a good size janitorial closet. Works great!

Our PTC bought a storage shed some years ago, and the school has pretty much decided it is the perfect place to store used uniforms that have been donated to the school...OMG, we're talking about 22 huge rubbermaid containers. I'm thinking of absconding with the key to the shed and not letting the principal have access anymore!!!

Live and let live, and use your PTA/PTO funds to buy a shed. You'll never be able to build a successful organization if you can't establish your presence at the school.

We actually weighed out the cost of the loss we were incuring due to items comming up missing and found that with all the items we had, it out weighed the cost of a storage building. The storage is running $800 a year, so we spen more than that replacing missing items. Hope this helps.

We also encountered the "sorry, but you have to give up your PTO room, we need it for something" monster. We did the "store it at someone's house and then try to figure out who had what" thing. We finally decided it was worth the money in terms of availability and saving our sanity to rent a storage space. It's conveniently down the street from the school and although we couldn't work a deal, it's not THAT expensive. Now we're able to actually do more because we can take advantage of super sales when we find them and not worry about where to put it till we need it.It also gives us space to work. We just accept it as necessary. In fact, we "found" some of the money for it by deciding to give up our helium tank--it cost us just to have it and we rarely use it--it's easier/cheaper to spend $15 for one of the disposable tanks on the rare occasion we need some balloons blown up.We also voted to pay it up 6 months at a time to save a few $$.

We had similar problems until one day all the things stored at my house (against my husbands wishes) were needed for an event at school and we had a family emergency taking us out of town on a moments notice! this brought it all into perspective for school staff holding the storage space hostage. I think if it just gets laid on the line it should get cleared up. Also if you have been asking in private how about putting your principal on the spot at a meeting with all the rest there, Hard to say know to all those volunteers!

I'm the president of our PTO in a growing suburban community. The schools don't have the space to store our stuff and when the mom storing our stuff in her garage moved her husband refused to move it with them. Therefore, we decided to rent a storage space. We got a great price break and have had much success it. Also, because of the added space we were able to purchase a larger qty of trashbags and getting a price break. We've figured the cost of the storage unit is offset by the higher profits from our bag sales.