Thanks for the help. I got sample bylaws from a few places and I will be bringing them to the meeting for eveyone to look at. Thats priority #1 right now!! Getting them wrote and accepted.
Sounds to me that what you're doing is forming a new organization that looks and functions like the school subcommittee your PTO has been in the past. Yes, bylaws are #1. The EIN is assigned by the IRS. You can get it over the phone, but you should go to www.irs.gov
and print a copy of Form SS-4 first. That has all the info you need when you call the IRS, including the phone # to use. Since the money in your account is being held under the school's tax id (EIN) number, technically, that money belongs to the school. I'm no attorney, but it seems reasonable that the school could gift your PTO the money once you have a bank account of your own set up. I'd make it a formal transaction, substantiated by a letter and maybe even recorded in the minutes of a PTO meeting. The school might need some form of paperwork, too, since the money will be leaving a school account.
ohiomommieof4 I don't think you need to dissolve your group - since you have been using the School's EIN you need to get your by-laws together and just start along the path to non-profit. There is a lot of help in these boards on how to get there. But from what you have written it looks to me that all you need to do is get your EIN (it's available on-line, just google EIN and it will take you to the right page) then I suggest you incorporate and file for 501c3. You can usually get help on incorporating from the Sec of State office (at least they can head you in the right diection.) So dissolving your current PTO won't be necessary.
we are hoping to talk the other members into going 501--and I have read here the best thing to do is start from scratch( we are a pto that uses the schools ein numbers and we raise roughly 12,000-20,000 a year, we have no by-laws) and we need to become non profit but need to talk others into it--so my question is:
If we decide to do this we just start over and more or less pretend our PTO now did not exist right--do we rename the group or can we keep the same name--what about the money in the pto account now--can we just use the money for the new group? From reading posts we need to do this first then write and acept by-laws and that day we accept these is the day the new group becomes official--then we get our own EIN number (who do we call to get this from--we are in Ohio) after this number we can get a new checking and savings account set up? Then we Incorporate as non profit in our state(again who do we call for this) and then finally we apply for the 501 and we get this infor from www.irs.com
right
