We had our first meeting a few weeks ago and had 25 people attend!! We were psyched. We are a PreK - 12 PTO we have approximately 2000 kids school wide.

We meet every month and have a guest speaker every other month. We have the Principals (4 schools) speak at one meeting per year along with our Superintendent of Schools. We ask the Principals to bring 3 "friends" with them (teachers) to discuss what is going on in their particular school. Its a great opportunity to ask questions directly to the staff and Principal.

We list our meetings on our website along with putting the meeting and who the guest speaker is in all the school newsletters and their websites.

We also post our upcoming meetings on the marquee (sp?) of that school so parents know that their Principal is speaking.

Of the 25 that showed last month, there were 6 new faces. We send around an attendance sheet and ask people to put their name and email address on it. The day after our meeting, we send each person an email thanking them for attending and letting them know that we value their comments and suggestions AND to encourage them to come to the next meeting and give them that date.

I think its very important to acknowledge new people who attend the meetings in some way. Sometimes our meetings can be very long and we don't have a lot of time to "chat" after the meetings because its late or the custodian is kicking us out of the building.

One more thing, we keep a database of our members (past and present) and send out an email the day before our meeting as a reminder! We had many comments last month that if they hadn't rec'd that reminder email, they would have forgotten to attend.

We just held our first General PTA meeting for this school year last week. We had the best turn out we've ever had since I've been involved in our school's PTA. We did a light dinner donated by Tacone (a restaurant) and we served dessert donated from our fundraiser company we're using right now. We also offered child care for the first time. We had the younger sister (she's 21)of my 1st VP watch the kids. We gave her a set of movie passes. We had snacks for the kids as well as water. We showed "The Candyland" movie since it was short. Our library is connected to the teacher's lounge so we were within earshot of the kids. Everything went well. A few parents thanked us for providing child care since the other spouse works at night (remember we're a suburb or Las Vegas so the shifts are different than "typical" metro cities).

We hold board meetings once a month and general meetings 3 times a year. We need our monthly board meetings to be sure everything is going smoothly for our events. No one seems to mind.

I, too, gauge our success on the amount of people that show up to our events, not meetings. Also remember, there are those parents that support your group by participating in your fundraisers, but you may never actually meet them. There are lots of ways to support your school & student and not necessarily by the hours they log in at school.

Holly
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I think having volunteers for events is more important than attendance at the meetings. I also think no matter what time or day you choose to have it is not going to matter. If parents make it a priority then they come to them. All you can do is try your best.


Cindy

Lseaton-we have a school of about 375 and usually have about 20-25, so we're not much better off. I agree, I never sweated how many people came to the meetings. We had good success with getting volunteers, etc. so I considered that a success.

Sometimes I think our group has TOO MANY meetings (one every month) and it's probably not really necessary. Some schools have only board meetings that anyone is invited to attend and that may be even more worthwhile, I don't know.

One thing we did a few years ago that worked well was that we changed our day meeting to 12 noon and we serve lunch (donated). This upped our meetings from 5-6 people at 8:00 a.m.(7 years ago) to about 20-25 people at noon. Now, we alternate and have some evening meetings (5:30) and we get a different crowd at those meetings (usually smaller attendance).

Good luck!

Try having a small group of children perform at the meeting. Also, we tried a "cafe style" meeting - round tables set up in our gym with a carafe of coffee & dessert on each table.

[ 10-04-2005, 10:26 AM: Message edited by: robnest ]

If I've learned one thing from these boards, it's don't sweat the meeting attendance. If I have volunteers coming to events and helping out and me not having to worry about that, then I don't worry about how many are at the meetings. Plus, you can't gripe and complain about decisions that are made at meetings if you are not there. I've used that line before!! ha ha