We had the same issue last year, but with a twist. An elementary school down the street was closed and merged with our middle school creating a K-8 school.
While two different PTA's would be merged, each approached the situation differently. The elementary school had a "blow out" bash and did spend nearly all of their money while the middle school saved a large portion of money to enable the new school to have money to create programs to bring both the students and the staff together in the next school year.
While obviously choosing different paths, neither was really the "wrong" way to go. The choice is an individual one. Weigh your goals for the next schools incarnation and decide from there.
These days, many districts are tasked with the difficult job of trying to make budgets balance with no money. As a result, many schools are closing and being reconfigured. While any closure is a difficult thing, one thing to keep in mind is that our children take their cues from the adults in their lives and while this situation may not be of your choosing, try to make the best of it.
Leave enough cash to take the best of each school, merge traditions where possible and show your kids that change can be ok.
There is an extreme possiblity that our school may be closing at the end of the year. The executive board have decided to re-vamp the budget to reflect spending all monies. We allocated money to a family year end event and as in the back to school bbq we have decided to have the executive board handle this function. If perhaps some chance the school stays open we can then carry that money over.
We are planning several different options to present to the PTA to vote on for this "final event" however, I got some resistance at the PTA meeting last night that they want to decide what we do... however, when I asked for a chair none of them said they wanted to do it. It's always about complaints and never solutions, which is why in most cases the Eboard is faced with running events ourselves.
Also, we had a huge turn out last night because on the PTA reminder notice we said we were discussing "as per the BOE finance committee proposed budget cuts the closing of our school". Again, people complained that this went home. At a normal meeting we usually have a showing of 12 PTA members... at last nights we had 75. And I gracioiusly said... while I understand your concern, do you need to be afraid you aren't going to have a school to come and be involved? If you would have come to prior meetings you would have been informed that this is the direction the BOE was headed.
