Our school has what is called a Wednesday folder system. EVery Wednesday a special folder is sent home with each child. Any information that we have to send is usually sent home on Wednesday throughout the whole school year. It is a wonderful system! The parents love it. Even those who never look in their kids back packs any other time, do on Wednesdays, because that is when most of our flyers go home. Once in a while we will have a flyer on a different day, but I would say that 90% of flyers go home on Wednesday. Other schools in our area have adopted the program because it works so well. Our registration form actually goes home in mid august with the prientation packets. Our kids do not find out until orientation packets who they have for a teacher. So every child gets one. We have one flyer that goes home in that. One side is membership and the other side is an order form for note to school pads. We have found this works wonderfully. And we KNOW that every parent/guardian gets one. [img]smile.gif[/img]
Actually, we haven't even yet begun school yet. We start back on 9/2. And we don't have a registration night......but we do have an Open House which is in late September/early October. We will definately have a table or something for that.
Last year, I asked the teachers (I also teach at the school my son goes to) to donate money...whatever they felt comfortable and I went to BJ's and got desserts so the parents felt welcome. Hopefully our fledgling PTO can do that this year.
As far as getting organized and getting parents involved we have done a couple of new things this year that appear to have worked very well. We had two student registration nights this year. There are a number of tables that all parents have to go by and have checked off of a list in order to complete the registration process. This year our table was added as a manditory stop in order to check out. At the table I had a sign up sheet for class representatives and sheets to volunteer for each of our four major events for the year. Those are selling entertainment passbooks, a fall festival, a silent auction, and Grand Tour which is a bicycle event held with the other Austin TX lutheran schools. As a result all of our classes have representatives, which was not the case last year, and all of our volunteer slots for every event is full long before any of the events take place. Last year there was a lot of begging for volunteers right up to the day of these events. That will not happen this year. You have probably had your registration night by now but Back to School nights are coming and you might want to try something like that then.
I see that many of you listed the sorts of things you put into these binders or fliers...do any of you have samples you could send me?
I am the co president of a middle school pto. The PTO was extremely inactive and a few of us got it going around January. WE sponsored many fun things but this year it's time to be serious!!! LOL...actually, I mean, more organized, raising money to spend money rather than just spending (our own) money.
Any thoughts you have would be appreciated!
Myanna
We send home a packet of information, pto membership form, volunteer from, school district volunteer back ground check form, a calender of events and a inventation to our volunteer meeting that take place two weeks after school starts.At our volunteer meeting we go over all events (why we do it, who it helps, when it happens, where it take place at) we also talk about what our volunteer can do to help us out with each even. I find having a volunteer meeting can realy weed out the people who want to help and the people who fill out the paperwork to make them self feel good.
Our school starts August 18th and we will have our Volunteer Handbooks go out August 19th in the kids Tuesday folders. The quicker the better I feel. Last year was our first year and our volunteer coordinator quit early on without doing anything, so we didn't get things going until Oct. We didn't do too bad, but it could have been much better earlier.
