The PTO at the school my kids currently attend has a contest to see which grade level can get the most involvement at PTO meetings. There is a sign in sheet by grade level at each meeting and at the end of the year (this past week's meeting) $100.00 was given to the grade level that had the highest attendance. The teachers from that grade level get to decide how to spend that $$ but it has to be among all kids (pencils, ice cream).
We have the same problem. I am hoping that our new principal next year makes it something that the teachers have to do. If 2 come to each meeting, not even all of the teachers have to be involved. I am inacting a policy of signing in next year at each PTO meeting so we can truly see who is there and when. Our current principal only attends about half of the meetings so why should the teachers come?
Our school has at least one teacher from each grade level (K-5) on the board (not executive board). The principal and elementary resource teacher are also on the board.
We have accomplished this in a couple of different ways. One year the Team Leader teacher from each grade level was on the board. This year, the Principal asked for two teachers to volunteer from each grade level, and they take turns attending monthly board meetings. We get a fairly good response. We have a couple of teachers that attend EVERY meeting, and others who never come.
we don't have much success with this either. two have been involved periodically this year otherwise nothing at all. i have personally invited them as well as reminder notes - no use. we can't even get them to sign up for eScrip and 4 of them have students who attend the school! why is it that they expect us to do things for them when they can't even participate to tell us what their needs might be? go figure, maybe they think that since most of us are mothers that we should be able to read their minds too!
We also have teacher reps on our board, 2, 1 for K-2, and the other for 3-5, however they are the only teachers that come and sometimes I dont think they even listen!! It is very frustrating to us that we are going to speak w/ our principal w/in the next 2 weeks about this so next year will be better!!!!
Like a lot of the others, our PTO has 3 teacher reps that are on the Exec. Board. They attend the exec. meetings as well as the regular meetings. It works out great. They act as the liason between the board and the teachers. They also help us with choosing the assemblies that our PTO sponsors. We give them all teh assembly information===they pick it out---we schedule it. They also attend any PTO functions; family nights, etc. They encourage other teachers to help out. We've been really lucky!! We'll miss the ones we had this year... But really look forward to working with our new teacher reps for next year!
