Cape Dad, Your board of education would collect those finance papers and do the filing for you. If your district has 5 schools, then each PTO in the 5 schools would complete their end of year balance sheet, send over final papers to your Board of Education office and then they would be responsible for collating all the data for one filing. Your Treasurer is actually getting off the hook for completing all those state and federal forms that have to be filed each year.

WFS;132831 wrote: Its just the tax filing that you file as one PTO.

It can work and it can be designed to assist the Treasurer's obligation with the state and federal paperwork. It's doesn't have to be set up to work as one entity and all schools work together on everything.

Just coordinating the accounting controls and reporting seems like a nightmare to me, and I don't see much of an advantage except for saving on the initial fee. We have a hard time getting all our finances together at the end of the year for the audit and 990. I can't imagine if we had to collect reports from ten different schools to consolidate on one tax form. There goes our summer!

I suppose you could achieve significant economies of scale with things such as wholesale purchases and advertising/printing, but again, I think it would be a full time job for at least one person to coordinate it.

I think decentralization is the way to go with parent groups.

You can have a district PTO, but for tax filing only. Each school would still have their own organziation and plan their own events. They even have their own bank accounts. Its just the tax filing that you file as one PTO.

It can work and it can be designed to assist the Treasurer's obligation with the state and federal paperwork. It's doesn't have to be set up to work as one entity and all schools work together on everything.

Dues are $50 per school. Half goes towards administrative costs and the other half goes to fund the school budget committee.

A district PTO would be a tough pill to swallow for those PTers that have gotten used to doing things their way for so long now having to answer to a oversite PTO but having all PTO's work together under has its appeal. Many PTO in districts do run similar events & fundraisers - working together sounds much better than working with lack of communication. Education and outreach can only improve even if it is not exactly the best advice you have heard or agree with ... still learned something.

That sounds like an administrative nightmare for the officers of this mega-PTO. It's tough enough administrating a PTO at a typical school.