Typically, bylaws changes must be voted on at a general meeting open to the entire membership. Check your own bylaws to see whether they allow something different.

Can members vote at regular monthly board meetings? I was under the impression that if items needed to have a member vote, it was done at quarterly general meetings or special meetings; only items that board members needed to vote on were discussed and voted on at monthly board meetings. Specifically, can bylaws changes be done at a regular monthly board meeting by holding a member vote at this meeting?

This topic is of great interest to our group. For at least the past two years I've been at our school, our PFA meetings are held early evening and often run 90-120 minutes. The only people who generally show up are board members, though we do try to get the word out to all parents and try to make them feel welcome.

We absolutely want to boost parent communication and all forms of involvement, and I think meetings can be great for this. Two issues we're wrestling with:

1) Time of day: many of our families live outside our district and we've heard it is hard for them to come back at night. That leaves us the options of switching to students' morning drop-off time (which leaves out those parents and board members whose work hours aren't flexible), switching off every other month, or completely separating "board" vs "general" meetings.

2) Rose replied in this thread that general meetings should be somewhat specific, and board meetings should be more general and "big picture". My thinking is the exact opposite of Rose -- that the monthly Board meeting is the time for detailed committee reports, specific budgeting and planning discussions, etc...while general meetings (perhaps quarterly?) should be more about big-picture goals, general plans, looking for new ideas, feedback, or deciding between a handful of ideas, encouraging volunteer involvement, big-picture budget overview, the principal's update of school and district issues, etc., and maybe even a guest speaker who would be of interest to parents.

If we brought our board meetings, as is, to the school-at-large...we'll have a lot of people to wake up at the end of the night (or morning or whenever).

Thoughts?

What kind of business is done at Executive meetings and general meetings. At our school there is a lot of executive meeting and they vote on what fundraised money is spent on and they also voted in officers and chairpersons.