Looks like Im a lonely leader with this topic...
we have NO teacher reps anywhere, not even monthly meetings=) Let's just say the line at our school between parents and staff is pretty intensed!!I am thrilled that so many you do have that support.someday we will get there!

Here I go again in left field... Our best year as was with a teacher as the President. She was great and had the time and energy needed to do the great job! Meetings were always afterschool and she would give two students extra credit to watch my little boys (at the time!). Now we really just have the teacher reps and the Principal on the Board.

We had one teacher on our board last year and have two this year. Neither one has children at the school, they just feel they want to be more involved. Both really appreciate everything the PTO does and want to give their time. They provide great insight into the needs of the teachers and students and we have not had any conflict of interest problems, but maybe that's because of their personalities and motives for being on the board. I could see where some might take advantage but you will have parents who do that too. We just felt that since we are a Parent/Teacher Organization and we want input from our teachers, that they should be part of the board if they desire. It's worked well for us.

We have a large Exec Board comprised of the elected officers, principal, vice principal, two teacher reps, parent rep from each grade, and all the committee chairs. (Note this size/breadth is intentional as all business decisions are made by this group with only 2 general meetings a year.)

Typically, teachers do not get involved in our board unless they are the teacher reps or are also parents. Our bylaws prohibit any employee of the school or any management level employee of the district from being an ELECTED officer, but that's only 5 of the 25+ seats. If a teacher wanted to chair a committee (and would then also be on our board), they could.

We just dealt with this issue at our nomination committee meeting! Someone who is a substitute teacher was mentioned to run for Pres or one of the VPs (she has two kids in the school), and it was decided that the possibility of conflict of interest was too great. Besides the possibility of her being afraid to go toe to toe with her bosses if she ever had to, we also were afraid that if she made a decision that the other teachers wouldn't approve of, they could really make her life miserable.

We have both a teacher and a para-professinal representative on our board. Before we added them as official positions three years ago, it seemed like we were spending a lot of time smoothing ruffeled feathers because someone misunderstood somehting that was said or wasn't communicated clearly. Both of these individual bring termendous insight into discussions from a staff perspective and we appreciate and value their participation. Our PTA works so much better as a team this way. Our bi-laws prohibit any school district employee from holding the position of president or vice president. This really makes good sense because, even though we have a great working relationship with our principal now, you wouldn't want to put a staff member in the position of going head to head with their boss over an issue. Currently our board secretary is a parent but also a para-pro in one of our special education classrooms. This her second year as secretary and we haven't had any problems. Our board members also have a three year term limit.