We have teachers and staff as board members, if it wasn't for them we wouldn't have a ptso. That is one thing our principal actually does support. I am sorry to hear you are feeling pressure from the principal. The job is hard enough. They should be on your side.
If your board and member vote on expenditures, then you should be able to do what YOU want with your monies, not what the principal wants. Do you have an annual approved budget? If so, here is how you proceed: At the beginning of next school year(or even now) ask all of the teachers to put together a list of items that are needed in the school that will improve educational opportunities for the students. When you put together a budget for the year, designate a specific amount to go toward those wish lists. When the lists come in, your board then sits down and reviews them and selects items that will be of benefit to the largest number of students. Prioritize the items and authorize the money to purchase those items until your budgeted amount is gone. Do this every year. If your principal tries to get you to spend the money elsewhere, simply tell him/her that you are following the approved budget, that the members felt that this sum of money should go to teacher needs, and that is how it will be spent.
This should also save individual teachers from being pressured by the principal because the lists are coming from everyone.
Very interesting. In my area school staff can be executive officers of the PTA. In many cases, this is because there aren't any interested parents. We even have school staff being PTA President. The principal "forces" school staff to be on our PTA board, in particular one position (membership), because thousands of membership dollars "walked off" the year before.
Considering that each voting member of your board has only one vote, it's inconceivable that the faculty are so certain the reason budget went toward school needs instead of teacher requests this year is because there was no teacher on the board.
The situation really seems to be a board that has allowed budget to be dictated or overly influenced by the principal. This has resulted in a PR problem with the faculty. Both issues can be solved if you campaign board members to consider balancing budget expenses between teacher needs and school needs more equally next year. It seems to me that your ability to sway the board towards granting more teacher needs is greatly strengthened by the fact that a good portion of this year's expenditures satisfied school needs -- so, the pendulum needs to swing back toward the teacher's needs next year.
Once a balance in expenditures is seen next year, your PR problem will be greatly lessened. And, once motions for teacher needs are passed by the board at a greater frequency than this year, the principal's goal of keeping faculty off the board in order to avoid opposition to school need requests will become an exercise in futility.
So, expend your energy priming next year's board members on the rational for granting teacher requests as opposed to figuring out how to get a faculty or staff member on the board and you'll win this battle.
I'm the secretary on our PTO and in our bylaws....No person that gets paid by the school can be on the PTO or sub for the school. So it is weird to me that, you can have a teacher or staff member on your board...
I have been the PTO President this year, and it appears I will be again next year. I love doing it, but lack of interest in others serving has left me with in a difficult spot. I have interest in both the VP and Treasurer offices, but need to fill the Secretary position. This is where the conflict lies.
This year the majority of our money has gone to major school needs, and not to individual teacher requests. We fill every request we receive, however, we haven't given the teachers a large sum of money for supplies as has been done in the past. This has been blamed on not having a teacher or staff member on our board. At the beginning of our school year, the Principal convinced a teacher to resign stating he did not have the time to take on the PTO this year. I found another teacher replacement, who also backed out at the last minute.
Now I am trying to set up for next year and have asked one of the office staff to fill the position of Secretary, and the Principal told her it is a conflict of interest. How so? I am not sure how to approach this. I have taken a lot of flack this year for the teachers not feeling as if they are being represented, but if the Principal is going to fight me on it so she can get new computers and copiers, I'm not sure my skin is thick enough for another year.
I have toyed with the idea of changing to a PA but I am not sure what this will do to our support. Has anyone dealt with this? Our bylaws state teachers and staff can serve as officers but the Principal is doing this behind closed doors.
