If the PTO wants to consider the funding as a gift to school, then you could continue. However, if not, it should be the district's responsibility of funding all material that is used for curriculum. PTO expenses should be for extras that compliment their curriculum (assembly, school trip, guest speaker, etc.)

Our PTO has paid for the Weekly Reader and National Geographic for many years now. For the upcoming school year, our new principal has agreed to pay for them. They are quite costly, so we aren't going to argue. We are just glad that the teachers and students will get to enjoy them for another year.

I would have to lean on them taking it over themselves, I can't imagine the amount of work keeping all of the accounts seperate, sounds like something that needs to be given to someone else!

These very same items are the ones that I question in our budget. The PTO orders a yearly subscription for grades 1-4 and picks up the tab. There is never any parent donation or school/district funds that go towards it. It's all us.

Thankfully, we order the subscription to begin in the fall and never have to mess with it again.

I suggest that you be honest with the teachers and tell them that it's getting to be too much to handle. Find a system that will work best for your organization monetarily and timewise. Chances are, there are a couple of teachers out there that feel the same way you do. Rally them to discuss the situation with the other teachers.

We are ordering 50 copies of each grade level and the classes that wish to use them are going to pass them around. That costs $750. This past year was one per student and that cost $2260. So we are very happy with the new arrangement for next year.

If they are using these items as part of their classroom curriculum, then the school district should be responsible for handling the programs. If they are simply choosing to use these items on their own, then I would make each teacher responsible for collecting their classroom's funds and maybe even go so far as having the teacher pay for the items and then submit a receipt to the PTO for reimbursement. If the teacher is made responsible for getting the funds, then she/he will probably make a bigger effort to remind parents to send in the money.

Does your group give each teacher discretionary funds each year? If so, they could use these funds to cover the children who don't bring in the money.

Our PTO has for a couple years took care of the accounts for Weekly Reader and Scholastic News for our teachers. These are educational pamphlets that some of our teachers use in class. The teachers collect the money submit to the PTO and we write a check.
Here is the issue with PTO we are having not all the teachers use this suplement, collecting the money from the teachers and keeping all the accounts staight( copies needed how much due etc) Our main problem has been that if parents did not send in the funds the PTO covered it in whole only for students that were low income. But over the past few years more parents are not sending in the funds then we can handle. The PTO does not pay for this because not all students do not use these pamphlets and we belive the money could be used more wisely such as field trips and things which were cut from our school budget.
My question is this is very time consuming for our treasurer to handle sorting out who paid, trying to get parents to pay, collecting from teachers, and handling all the different accounts. Should this be a PTO responsibility or the teachers or the schools. Does anyone else have somehthing like this they handle and I am not sure how to approach our principal on this. But its getting too time consuming for our treaurer and I personally believe it shouldt be somethng the PTO should be doing. Any advice?