My July post has now been overcome by events. Our funds became limited and the teachers asked for some big ticket items. We've decided to go with a request process similar to Critter. We will "give" the principal a set amount of money to fund the requests for support and she will prioritize them until the money runs out. That way no person in the PTO is faced with telling the speech teacher her requirements didn't make the cut, and the librarian that hers did. d
I would be interested in that as well. Our PTO had our grant applications due from all K-8 teachers in the district last Friday. Our PTO has grown from covering approx. 1200 students last year to 3000 this year -- so I know we will be getting far more requests than we have money to spend. I have no idea how we will weed thru all the requests except the initial look at whether the application is complete. And I know there are some big money items in there as well as requests for less than $100. I'm thinking that after this upcoming decision session we will definitely need to come up with some guidelines...
Writermom, I'd love to see a copy of your grant request form, it sounds more detailed than ours. I like what you said about educational benchmarks. The trust fund that is used to fund our grants is called an "educational trust," which (in my mind at least) rules out requests for things like new lockers. My email address is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. -- thanks!
In order to make a request, our teachers fill out a grant request form that must meet certain educational benchmarks and must be for all of their students. This system was put into place years ago, but has not been used in several years. Our board decided to reinstate them this year and now I am trying to figure out how to do this fairly.
We will be receiving teacher grant requests in November and we have a certain dollar amount to spend on all grants. If we don't get very many, or any high dollar requests, we will be able to cover them all.
My dilemma comes in if we get a lot of requests, or even one that requests a large amount of money. I don't know how to handle this. If 30 teachers all request money, how do we decide which ones get money, assuming all of them meet our criteria? First come first served is the only way I can think of that will be fair. But then since teachers will turn these grants into the PTO mailbox, how to track in what order they come in?
Any ideas on how to handle this would be greatly appreciated!
I am on the executive board of the PTO at our elementary school and am now on the executive board of an honest-to-goodness PTA at our middle school. At the elementary school we give up to $150 per teacher (with receipts) to every teacher, plus a grade-level grant to each grade level to pay for something that directly impacts the kids. We don't look at the teacher reimbursement, but we do vote (executive board) on the grade-level grants to make sure they are appropriate (we run them by the principal first). We do not accept any other requests from the teachers.
At the PTA, wish-list items come to the principal's secretary first, she decides which things the school can afford to pay for, then passes on the rest to us. My job is to present those at our meetings and they get voted on there. Most pass, but we had huge discussion on one last time that did not pass.
I don't think either way is better than the other. I think the money to everyone is more fair to the teachers, but at the middle school we didn't even spend all our budgeted funds last year because the teachers didn't submit enough requests.
could someone please send me a copy of a teacher request form. My email is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Thanks
