I agree with you Jenn...it is a parent and teacher group...how can we expect parents to participate if we don't have full support and cooperation from the teachers?

Since this is our first year with 100% teacher membership, I will be promoting that heavily this fall, to encourage parental support.

My two cents: I think that their is no reason why a teacher can not join the PTO/PTA. The "T" stands for Teacher, right? Anyway...I am grateful that our principal is a HUGE supporter of our parent group. She "gently" encourages all her staff (office and teaching) to join without excuses. She will bring it up at every staff meeting and in emails as well. She asks our membership chair to give her a list of staff that has not joined and she will directly ask them about it. I know this sounds bad - but I appreciate her support so much.

Also - we do so much for our school and for our staff - that our teachers don't need much prodding to join. They appreciate us and can't imagine what life at school would be like without all that we do.

Plus - we give every member an envelope full of coupons for free stuff from local restaurants that far exceeds the cost of the membership. It's a win/win situation. I posted a complete description of this under another thread - something like "membership incentives" I think.

anyway...those are my thoughts. Teachers and Parents need to join together to make our schools the best they can be.

strategies to unite families, schools and communities to work together for student success.

Communicating, ie. improve communications. Good communications provide the foundation for effective collaboration. With an awareness of what is happening and what is needed comes an understanding of how parents or teachers or community members might be able to better support the development of a child. One topic of communications might be to encourage families to attend various school events or special events including concerts, sporting events or assemblies with their children.


Learning at home. Enable parents to help children learn at home. Parents can support student learning at home by supporting homework completion, good course selections, good choices in after-school activities and in many other ways. However, parents sometimes need information, coaching and support to enable them to help their children at home. Homework seminars, course selection nights, and clear homework expectations are just three examples.


Parenting. Help parents build parenting skills. Schools and community groups can both play a role in helping parents to understand and deal with the various phases of growth and development that children go through, and be prepared to deal with some of the tougher issues like bullying, drugs and peer pressure.


Volunteering. Encourage volunteerism and manage volunteers well. This includes designing meaningful roles for volunteers, providing training and feedback. This also includes fundraising for a purpose, and managing the frequency of fundraising initiatives to avoid contributor burn-out.


Participating in decision-making. Encourage and develop leadership through school councils or volunteer boards designed to help children succeed. Develop goals, decision-making processes to enable people with diverse backgrounds to collaborate to help children succeed.


Collaborating with community. Enable community groups to collaborate with schools and families to provide extended learning opportunities and activities for children.
There is plenty of research available to validate these six strategies as the keys to success in elevating rates of parental involvement and to use to enable families, schools and the community to work collaboratively for student success.

Schools can’t do it alone. Neither can parents nor community members. As difficult as it is to foster innovation and collaboration, research demonstrates that time and money invested in solutions that unite the efforts of families, schools and the community improves the potential for student success.

And in its broadest sense, isn’t that what the business of education is all about?

I think having the teachers join the PTO is a leftover from when we were a PTA and this was one the things required by them? I guess I never really thought about it after we switched over. Maybe this is something we need to reconsider.

Another PTO Thread on this topic

I know there are schools out there who only give money to teachers who are paid PTO members, but that just doesn't seem fair to me. Why should the kids in the classrooms suffer because their teachers aren't members for whatever reason? I'm not trying to start a fight--I really do wonder how PTOs who operate like this view this issue.