We just sent our first newsletter of the year to the printers. We publish three a year-fall, winter and spring. We include upcoming events, pictures and stories of recent events, surveys,letters from the principal and PTO chairs, a fun activity and recipe that families can do together, as well as our most popular-pictures drawn by students. We dedicate our center spread to illustrations or stories made by students. The kids love it and it gets the parents to really look at it.
It usually takes us about 3-4 weeks to gather info and then a week for layout and editing. Our average newsletter is @6-8 pages. And the end result is worth all the time!
This project is also good for those parents that want to help out, but don't have a lot of time to meet face to face. We usually get together once at the beginning and then do the rest by phone and e-mail. This way working parents can help out from home at night.
Just do your best the first time and each and every newsletter after that gets easier and better.
Deciding how big and how often is very much going to be an issue of deciding your purpose. In our district, some schools do their newsletter monthly and some quarterly. We publish every other week.
However, at most schools there is a principals newsletter put out by the office weekly or bi-weekly. At our school, we put that information into our newsletter and save the office staff the duty of preparing, copying and distributing it. It's just one more service we provide to the school. We have a new principal this year, and he was planning on having his own newsletter just like he has at the last two schools he ran -- he was until the school secretary explained to him how we do things at this school. Now, he's happy as a bug in a rug
We publish the principals column, information about upcoming events, calls for volunteers, thanks for previous event volunteers, promote district events and the parent resource center, brag about our kids, and classroom reports from the teachers. It all gets put together over the weekend, and on Monday school staff proofreads it and makes sure all content is approved by the principal (a requirement to have teachers send it home in the backpacks).
We've had other schools question our tactics, but we send home fewer special notice flyers than they do. Parents learn pretty quickly that every other Tuesday is press day, and that this is the place to look for information.
mom&teacher,
We have a newsletter that I am very proud of. We have reenergized our parents with our newsletter this year. Our goal this year was to structure our newsletter for today and tomorrow not yesterday. We include community info, student surveys, teacher profiles, fundraising info, thank you's and much more. We are also doing our newsletters in color and they are beautiful. Find a computer parent to head this. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to e-mail me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. I do not get onto the ptotoday website as much as I would like.
we publish a newslette monthly and this year we have a new pto member to handle it. we include upcoming pto events ,ie, family nights , fundraiser delivery dates. we also include info about our students that a parent submit, such as baseball champs over the summer, advancements in boy or girl scouts, etc. this year we are including teacher profiles, teachers willing to participate completed a questionaire with topics like, what was your fav/or least fav subject in school, hometown, college. we had a business sponsor page for two years but that is up in the air at the moment.
We're resurrecting our newsletter this year. We're aiming for monthly. I notified the teachers about it so they can inform us about interesting things they're doing & send us student's work. We hope to hear from committee chair & recap the meetings. We'll also go over our schedule of events. Can't give you any samples since we haven't published any yet.
I am a PTO president and am wanting to start a newsletter for the PTO. I would like to see some sample newsletters if anyone does them. How often do you do them? What topics do you write about? etc..
