We had our first board meeting last week. We changed our meetings to 6:00, 3rd Thursdays of certian months. A schedule will be made and handed out with our PTO packets. I still think this is too late for the teachers, but the teacher on the board thinks it is much better than 6:30. So we will hope for the best.

Thanks for all the responses. We'll see how it goes soon enough. Sounds like 7:00 p.m. would be a better start time than 6:30--I'll bounce that off the other board members and see what they think.

PTO boarder To answer your question there is a school in our district that changed from night to after school this year. what has happened is yes they get about 8-12 teachers each meeting but only two or three parents. I guess it depends on who you would rather have, as part of our PTO we formed a commitee to look at Parent Involvement using the national PTA assessment. We meet right after school so that we could get out two teacher reps, but it is very hard for the seven parents to make it. Our pto meetings are from 6;30-7:30 on either monday or wednesday, we try to alternate each month.

We've always had night meetings at 7:00. Two years ago our principal asked us to change to 6:30 so he could spend more time with his new baby. We did, but it affected attendance for some of our most reliable attendees. Moms said 6:30 was often too early - dad wasn't home from work yet or dinner wasn't finished. Sure, they could come late, but usually they didnt' come at all.

We, too are kicking around options for next year including maybe a day meeting or two. But in the end, I bet we'll stick with 6:30pm. We're looking to use email, too, to send the minutes out so even if someone misses a meeting, they can stay in touch.

Like someone else said, meeting attendance doesn't define success and the people who really want to come will make it a priority.

We are also discussing changing the meeting time for next year and I am ALSO the new president proposing such a thing!

However, we polled all the staff and asked them "how can we put the "T" back in PTO?" They said if we had the meetings after school they would be more apt to come because then they wouldn't be all the way home to come back after spending all day at the school.

1/2 of our teachers live in another town approximately 15 miles away.

I would like to try after school meetings and the rest of the board will go along with what I suggest they don't seem to have a strong opinion. The only comment that has come up is "what about the students who take the bus?" My rebuttal was "can the parent pick up the student one day a month?". the particular parent wasn't too thrilled.

Currently we hold our board meetings directly before the membership meetings and would change that to the day/evening before.

I'm stuck on whether or not to alternate between day and night (every other month) or just stick to to days only. I'm worried we may lose folks with the changing back and forth.

I'm not as concerned about losing our night parents because I think we would just see a swap with after school parents. A new and different breed. We would continue to offer childcare at each meeting as well.

Has anyone ever done after school meetings?

I thought about suggesting rotating because most of our hard core PTOers do not have public jobs, their schedules would be more flexible BUT I wouldn't want to leave the teachers out. I know some PTOs have teacher reps but I am not sure we could make that work. We only employee about 70 staff members including custodians and cooks, and classified staff plus we give a supply basket and banner to the teacher with the most parents attending IF the teacher is present. I suppose we could tweak that. Our survey was pretty much split. I am also afraid if we had it in the mornings the teachers would really gripe if a decision was made they didn't approve of (we have that problem anyway I am just afraid it would be worse).