Our organization meets monthly for an hour. Our officers meet monthly for about three hours. We try to accomplish as much as possible so the organizational meetings can go as quickly as possible.
C.Brooks--We send a flyer to the parents via the "carrier pigeons." We announce there's going to be a meeting, what's on the agenda, and encourage people to come and get info, voice their opinions/ideas and if they're not already a member to become one then. Our meetings are always in the evening (after school activities for everyone but me are the killer on the afternoon time slot. I'm lucky and have one of those kids that doesn't go for organized sports; he'd rather play in the yard(s) with his friends [img]smile.gif[/img] ), and if you can't find a sitter, we tell people to just bring the kids. Most of them are OK, and only get antsy if the meeting goes longer than an hour.
Thanks for the input! Based on the info I've received, I will send out a survey. Our bylaws state that we have monthly meetings, so they will have to be amended if the majority are inclined. For those few members that have expressed wanting to have monthly meetings, the open board meetings will cater to those that want to be more involved.
We have monthly general meetings that are held on the first Wednesday of every month. They start at 7:30 pm and usually end an hour later. Some meetings we invite a school club to come and speak for about 15 minutes or a speaker or teacher from the school to talk about a program. This year we had a Solar Car club come and talk about their creations and the competitions they entered this year. They bought their cars and advisor to explain what they are all about. We have had another "Sims City Club" come with their cities they designed and entered into competition this year. We have also invited our new staff members to come to our October meeting to get acquainted with the parents and answer any questions posed to them. Our principals come as well as our Superintendent to offer any new information that might be of interest to the parents and they also answer any questions from the floor.
Since we do not operate with a "budget" per se, we have requests for items that are presented as mini grant requests at these meetings as well.
Our two schools k-8 comprise our organization with a student count of about 600. Having a monthly meeting has worked well over the years for us. We generally have 35 attend. Our meeting numbers jumped by 50% from over 3 years prior.
We also put out a monthly newsletter for everyone who was not able to attend the monthly meeting. It tells of all the grants that were posed to us and what we granted. We thank all who helped throughout the month in various areas of our HSA. The newsletter is like an open book to all about what is going on at the meetings as well as what is coming up in the month ahead. Communication is key. Hopefully, some more parents will attend just by seeing all that does go on.
Like JHB, a lot of our parents prefer evening meetings over day meetings due to work committments.
Hey, does any one have any ideas to get the fathers out to meetings? Currently we have only one dad who faithfully attends.
We have our meetings at 6:30, in the past we had them at 5:30. Some of our teachers have a 30+ minute drive. So it is not feasible for them to go home and come back. Our school is out at 3:00 and they don't want to put in another 3 hours. I think that is why alot of them leave without giving the PTO a second thought. Parents on the other hand are all in our district unless they drive their children to school (we have several of those). I am one of the lucky ones, I only live about 10 or so miles from school, I think some parents live a little farther in some of the communities, I think that is the northeastern part of the county, most of those parents do not come to meetings no matter what time we have them.
There's no perfect time. However, the majority of our families have two working parents. And we are an outer subdivision of a large city, so many people work 10, 15, 20 miles away - too far to pop over to the school during the day.
Having the meetings at night provides the widest opportunity for participation. We usually schedule them for 6:30.
