This year we have had alot of involvement in our PTO. We are holding our first evening meeting next Tuesday. Most of our meetings start at 9:00 right after carpool. For those parents with young children, we encourage them to bring them. We have a TV and run movies, puzzles and games so no excuse for not coming. Several of our parents work but can't attend meetings but are willing to do anything. We are trying to compile a list of parents and their specialities (website, art, crafts, caliograph etc.) Everyone is willing to help just don't want to be in charge. We have started sending home a newsletter every month with the notes from the meetings, what we need help doing (cookbook committee, golf tournament). It has been a huge success. Parents contact the committee chair of the event the want to help only. We had an event once where we needed sweets. We had enough left over we took to the fire station. We don't charge dues and remember everyone that every parent/teacher and adminstrator at the school is a part of the PTO and any ideas they have would be great.
For the first time this year, we assigned home room representatives (no one on the PTO committee could be a rep). The rep is the go to person for the PTO. the rep will then contact the parents in that class. The rep also provides feedback as to concerns, ideas, and suggestions from the parents.
Wow. You sound like me. We do about all that stuff to. Tim will tell you it is the quailty of the meeting not the quanity. I tend to agree with him for the most part. Are you also having trouble getting parents and teachers to help with events? What does your principal say?
One thing I do is hang on to our sign in sheets. We have one for parents and one for teachers. At the end of the year we are going to have a drawing for something worth $50 (probably from a resturaunt).
HELP!!! Does anyone have any ideas to incerease our parent involvement? We send out Welcome Packets, Personal Invivations to the meetings, reminder flyers of the meetings with our agenda on them, emails, PTO bullentin boards, PTO website and so on. We have a lot of volunteers but not a lot of people that attend our meetings. How do we get them there? Any suggestions you have please let me know. We thought about 50/50 raffles but that never worked, we don't have any teachers that come to our meetings either. Our PTO has gotten a bad rep the last couple of months how do I improve that? We started to offer food at our meetings but we still only have about 6 people. Our meetings are in the day becasue we're a K-2 grade school and a lot of parents wanted us to have morning and evening meetings so every other month we change when they are.
