At our school, the teachers attending meetings usually outnumber the parents! We have a teacher rep on the Board, plus the principal "encourges" them to attend( don't want to say, mandatory).
What we've done in the past is have a door prize drawing only for the teachers/assistants who are present. It's something different each time--it may be classroom supplies or a dinner for two or a spa package we've assembled. The most popular is color cartridges for their classroom printers--our principal doesn't believe in buying them.
We also believe in short and sweet as far as the length of the meetings. Teachers are at school all day and have families of their own, so we appreciate the extra time they put in to come to meetings. That goes for the working parents too.

Our middle school Principal and Assistant Principal alternate our monthly evening PTO meetings. It is during their weekly staff meetings that faculty members discuss what they would like to see from the PTO and submit their requests. It is ultimately the decision of the Principal as to whether these requests are valid enough to bring to the PTO Board. This type of management has worked well for our first year. We also found that as the year went on, more faculty members attended our meetings to show their appreciation and support. [img]smile.gif[/img]

At our school the teachers are all required to be on a certian number of extra committees each year (Accelrated Reader, School Improvement Team, etc..) our principal just assigns 2 teachers to the PTO teacher rep position. Our two assigned teachers show up at almost all meetings. It works well for us. Our principal is also at most of our meetings.

At least you guys have the principal in your corner--we brought this up and were told that our meetings weren't: a) convenient enough- 7:00~7:30 pm, and then accused us of not asking for their input!!! I thought my head was going to explode!

I respectfully told her that a) we have the meetings when it's convenient for the officers and the parents--a meeting is no good if none of us are there. (And BELIEVE me, I could promise the teachers all the jerwels in Chistendom AND have the meetings WHENEVER they felt it was good and none would show up anyhow). After school may be good for them, but as most of us have jobs that don't afford us the luxury of being done at 3:00 pm, or have kids who have about a ZILLION after-school activities it just doeesn't cut it for us.
b) That I felt I had practically done everything but begged on bended knees to get input, and after not getting any response (except for ONE WONDERFUL teacher who's very sweet) I wasn't about to harrangue people into doing something they obviously didn't want to be involved in. AND our principal is NO help either--I was disappointed that she doesn't rally the staff to be more involved--I think if she led, people would follow her example. I mean, if she's not putting it out there that it's important, how can anyone else be expected to think it is?

Our principal wasn't comfortable with money or gift certifs as incentives. First I tried free lunches from a local dinner. Disasterous. The same teacher kept winning, her aides also received the dinner and the teacher at them in front of the children during naptime. I wasn't fond of that even if they had already eaten. So we resorted to the much cheaper Supply Basket. $15-20 worth of supplies for the teacher in primary and the teacher in the intermediate grades with the most parents in attendance. I thought it would cover everyone. The parents wouldn't have to buy stuff for a while, the aides and teachers wouldn't have to worry about making notes requesting the stuff, and the children would use it. It still seems to be popular. What helps if you pre pack it a week or so before the meeting and display it in the workroom. When we first started the teachers were so excited that they all made mention of the PTO meeting on their newsletters. The catch for us is the teacher has to be there to win. And there is of course free food and door prizes.

[ 07-24-2004, 11:29 PM: Message edited by: C. Brooks ]

We tried something new last school year and it worked out well. We started an incentive for teachers that was in 2 parts. . .

1 - Each teacher will receive a $25 gift certificate to a teacher store in our area for attending one meeting (we had 5 teachers at our first meeting WOW) we had 3 of those 5 attend all but 2 meetings this school year and we had many other teachers attend throughout the year.

2 - The classroom with the highest parental attendance won a $50 gift certificate to the teacher store inour area.

I saw ideas similar to this on this discussion board last year and thought we would try it. It did work well for us so we are going to do it again and we are going to add a twist that we are tweaking now. I realize that the teachers have worked all day and want to go home and not come to a meeting so after speaking with our principal we decided that it would not hurt to try this and it was successful!

Good luck!