our pto mtgs. rarely have more than the officers and 2 or 3 other parents. Often teachers are too busy to attend-that is usually ok with us because ours is such a small school(232 enrolled). It is my duty to keep in touch with the staff at the school. I just began a newsletter and i am sending it to our 24 members, most of which never attend meetings. This month i will put out the second newsletter. The first one din't bring anyone new. Perhaps it will eventually.

At our meetings, we pass out instant lottery tickets to all who show up to the meetings. The main motivator at our school though is "jeans day" passes. The students wear uniforms and will get their parents to do just about anything so they can wear casual clothes. It works at our school and doesn't cost anything!

We are having a similiar problem. The idea we are looking at is to try is to reduce the number of true meetings and increase the number "fun meetings." For example, we met last week. I put in the agenda that I had a conflict with the February meeting and we could move it or decide one more item tonight and cancel the meeting. We cancelled the meeting! Fun meetings can be family fun nights. In March we are having a family reading night to celebrate Dr. Seuss's birthday. We are talking about doing a family game night next fall.
Secondly, our officers have been empowered to make more of the decisions together and bring only big items or ones that we aren't comfortable deciding on our own to the whole group.
Thirdly, we have agendas at the door when everyone starts arriving. At the top is always a FYI section which lists out decisions that have been made by the officers or information that the group should know. We do not discuss these in detail, but start the meeting by asking if anyone has questions/comments/concerns about any of these. We have occansionally changed decisions based on this time; however, it saves us a lot of time because you have to really feel strongly to speak up as opposed to open discussion.

Not only is the length of your meetings an issue, but what you do matters too. Are your meetings long and all your doing is business? Our PTA board meets the week before our general meeting and takes care of all the tedious work. If there is something that we need the general members to vote on then try to hash it out at board and take a recommendation to the general meeting. Of course we allow for discussion but it goes much quicker if we have a lot of the leg work (gather facts to answer questions and concers that are raised)done. Our businss meetings usually take about 15 minutes. We them adjourn the business portion and have a program. Usually a guest speaker on some subject of interest. Teachers from your building discussing, demonstrating, etc., something new they're doing is a good place to start. We've also had nurses, the health department (head lice, handwashing techniques, food handling), an allergist (children's allergies), authors, State PTA board members, parenting workshops, etc. Parents are more apt to come if they're getting something in return-knowledge and good information! It makes it more worth their time. We've also had drawings for door prizes at our meetings. We also send notes home a day or two in advance of the meetings as a reminder. We also put what the program or topic will be. We also bought stickers that said "PTA Meeting Tonight" on them and have the students wear them home on the day of the meeting. I hope some of this has been of help to you.

First off...how long do your meetings last? Since our new board of officers have taken over we have went from one and a half hours to forty five minutes or less. We even put in our newsletter that the meetings are now very quick. I also found that sending home an agenda a few days before the meeting helps too. We have even given special treats to the class who had the most parents at a meeting. One more thing you could try is switching meeting times periodically to accomodate everyone ie: our meetings are normally the third Tuesday of the month @ 7pm, we have tried having every other meeting right after school and having the kids play in the gym (with supervision of course) the teachers loved this because they did not have to hang out at the school for hours and parents didn't have to mess up their evening routines to come back to the school...

Lately our attendance has dropped off at our general meetings. This is not like us. Does anyone have suggestions on how to get the numbers up? I am game for ideas.