Nancy -
My response is a little different from the others. Your situation sounds like something that would happen in our school with scheduling. In our case anything that involves fundraising - I am of course assuming your hobby fair is a school fundraising attempt - would outrank any extra-curricular activity.

We are a small Pre-K thru 5 parochial school and have an after school sports program. The number of people affected by a change in one basketball game would be much less than the number of people invloved in a craft fair. Rescheduling of sporting events is very common unless we are talking about a tournament and in that case the athletic director should have been organized enough to put in on the calendar. I would have fought very hard before changing such an event.

I also believe that your event is more of a school activity than a basketball game as it welcomes and invites more families and should have a higher number of enrolled members than a basketball team.

I am by the way, have a daughter that plays basketball in our shcool program and president of our PTO, so in no way am I saying that sports are not important to a school environment - Team sports create a wonderful spirit within a school. Good luck in the future.

Nancy, my gosh! it is a good thing you just happened to hear through the grapevine. You are going the right direction too. It is unfathomable that the district does not have a better system in place. Hopefully they will look into it now! Our district wants all of our units dates and plans in May of the previous year. We do the best we can, but always have to pull some permits throughout the year. Good Luck!

Thanks for your thoughts!! We will be exploring with school personnel different ways to avoid this problem in the future. We are going to continue to have problems with scheduling our events in the future if we can never be confident that the time and place are assured. Also, I was only made aware of the conflicting basketball game via the "grapevine" at the school. I heard about it second hand. No one contacted me or the PTO even though my name, address, and phone number were at the bottom of the reservation form. I can only imagine if we hadn't found out about it until the week before the event! It does seem obvious that the right hand is not aware of what the left hand is doing. Our PTO goal is to give families as much time as possible to plan for these events since they may need to take off work, etc. in order to attend with their child. It seems, the school is making this very difficult for us to do. Hopefully, we will be able to work out some kind of understanding so that we can continue to do this for families.

In our school district everything is scheduled through our board of education. They keep track of all 15 buildings and all rooms/gyms/cafeterias and auditoriums. Our principal and custodian may approve a date but nothing is in stone unless we have a permit from the board of ed. in our hands. It sounds that you knew a school activity could take precedence here though. If that is what your "contract" stated then surely the basketball game wins. If this is the policy and the game was scheduled after yours was okayed then you may continue to have these problems in the future. We have several PTA/Booster clubs and community organizations that use our buildings. A school event will obviously win out over us.Can you think of another option for them?

Basketball wins. Unfortunately, sports will always win out. To be fair, there seems to be a communication breakdown somewhere along the line, but once games are scheduled opposing schools are notified and their schedules are also set. So to undo the game would affect not only your school's team, but another school as well.
You said you reserved the gym by going through the proper channels, but it seems that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
In our school system, the athletic diretor is in charge of ALL scheduling - gyms, auditorium, all fund-raisers have to go through him so there's not too many or the same thing at one time. It really helps to have one person in charge of all the facilities and what is going on outside of classroom stuff and to be able to have a master calendar of every single thing happening in the district's facilities.

Yes, the PTO is a school (affiliated)organization, but the sports are directly part of the school. I don't like it anymore than you do, and being the type of person I am, I'd just reschedule with a BIG note about WHY you have to reschedule (in a nie way, but getting the point across ). Can you talk to whomever the people are who reserve the gym spaces and see whether they are coordinating with each other or where the problem stems from? I'd say at this point the only thing you can do is help it from happening again.
I'm sorry to hear about your situation.

I would like opinions on this issue. At our school, the PTO reserved a gym in advance, via all the proper channels, for a PTO sponsored activity (Hobby Fair). We received signed confirmation that our reservation was approved and sent out our normal schedule of our events listing the dates and times- only to find out just recently that there has since been scheduled a girl's basketball game on the same night as our event and we have now been told we have to move our event somewhere or sometime else. (not many other options are available to us, either.) Our "hobby fair" is apparently not considered a "school activity" while the basketball game is considered a "school activity." School activities, according to our reservation agreement, prempt non-school activities. My question is this- is our PTO activity any less of a school activity than the extra-curricular basketball game? Should sports activities outrank academic activities? I would welcome any thoughts.