We have child care at our meetings also. We have a requirement in the high school that each students needs to complete 25 hours of community service.
We don't pay the children but we do donate some money towards the theater department each year on behalf of those kids. We normally pay $10 per meeting.
Another thing to watch out for is that you are covered incase something happened. Accidents or personal injury, etc. Make sure your Parent group has insurance and you are incorporated. Most disclaimers on the "use of space" forms that you sign at the school make you responsible if something was to happen. This would pertain to anyone there, not just child care or the kids. Being Incorporated would make you, yourself personally, not held accountable if someone was injured at your meeting. Without it, they could go after you personally, your money and assets. So just make sure you are covered.
We provide child care at our evening meetings for children over the age of 2. We use a high school honor society student. The same student is with us for the entire year and this is done for "community credit" but we typically give them a restaurant gift certificate of approx. $25 at the end of the school year. I don't know that this helps attendance but it does help with officers and committee chairs that have small children and husbands who want to participate in the meetings. Tonight, however, out of about 25 parents only 2 were dads!! Hope this helps!
We have the High School Key Club send volunteers to babysit at our monthly PTO meetings. We send them a request at the beginning of the year with the dates of all our meetings and a reminder each month and at the end of each year we make a donation to thier club. They get thier community service in and we get babysitters. Hope this helps....:0)
We do child care a little different. No cost to us. A parent volunteer and a faculty memeber sit in with the students and other siblings. We arrange for community members to come in and give presentations. Some examples are, US Forestry brings smokey bear, local sheriffs officer brings in his k-9 for a demo, fire department brings the big truck. I work for a law enforcement agency, so I arranged for our helicopter pilot to fly in and land on the ball field. He arrived a few minutes before the meeting, did his presentation and had question and answer time. Took almost the whole hour. The kids love it. If you start talking early and play up who is coming you will be surprised at the turn out that you will get. The kids want to come so the parents come. We have had better turn outs at our meetings since we started doing this. There are many different people and organizations that are more than willing to provide "show and tell" services to children free of charge.
We provide child care as well. We have a staff member (pay them $15) like a student teacher or someone from our after school program, and then have 2 teenagers (and give them 2 movie tickets ea, which we purchase at a discount). Our meetings run 1 hour and we ask them to be there 15 min before and stay till 15 after. If we run over (which hasn't happened yet) we will pay the staff member based on the $10/hr rate.
