Thank you everyone for your input. We will actually finally have our first PTO meeting next week. I had a meeting today with one of the teachers that were involved with the last PTO and took on the box tops task for her.
I now have an in with one of the teachers and am feeling confident that within the next year things will change.
Talk to the principal and see if you can come to a staff meeting and talk for a few minutes at the beginning-- introduce the new board and give out information about what you would like to see happen... and then keep the lines of communication open so teachers feel comfortable coming back and giving input.
We meet with teachers once a month and their staff meeting and talk for the first 5 minutes- letting them know what's coming up in the building from PTO as far as events and fundraising... and answer any questions they might have. You would be surprised to learn that many teachers and staff members didn't know the annual dance was in 2 weeks, or that our school would be the following friday.
Just because fliers go to classroom, don't assume all the teachers and staff read them and know what's going on- we found that kids on service squad would put fliers into the class folders, so teachers never even saw many of our fliers.
We had a simliar problem- needed to do major image control!
We hosted a luncheon for the teachers and told them it was going to be an information gathering session. We had a bunch of questions drawn up ahead of time and only took a half hour of the lunch to gather info. We also left a survey for those who couldn't come but wanted to give feedback. I think making them feel like they were being heard helped start things off right. Since then we make a point to over communicate and it seems that their opinion of us is changing.
Sounds like you are taking the right approach klbrengle! Forming a committee to brainstorm and address this is a great idea. I hope that the articles in the post below are of some help to you. Let us know what ideas you come up with to address this situation.
We are having this problem this year - the PTO leadership is lackluster and pessimistic and doesn't want to consider any of our new ideas. We decided to form a committee within the PTO specifically to address these kinds of issues.
We are planning to survey the teachers first to let them know that we care about their ideas and their needs and hopefully we can start building a better relationship between the PTO and the teachers.
