It seems strange that the PTO is collecting and allocating money for field trips. In my experience, schools do that. As for the liability issue contact your district's office and ask. There is a legitimate arguement that the trips are school sponsored. The students need signed permission slips, which come from the school. The event is occurring during school hours, therefore has the full backing of the school. Teachers are taking the kids, with parent volunteers to help chaperone I assume, and the teachers are employed by the school.
As for the money...why would there be a loss? Your treasurer cannot issue checks to pay bus companies and museums if there isn't any money in the account. If there's not enough money then there can't be a field trip. Why would there be a surplus? Who are you collecting the money from, the school or the parents?
This would be a state by state issue. All I can relate is my own state and the answer is yes the PTO would be responsible. You are not supporting a school activity you are sponsoring the activity.
I would suggest you contact NPN and join them so you can get the discounted insurance! The membership fee is more than made up for in the discount. Money should not be an issue with you since you said you generate over 100K a year.
Our district office handles all fieldtrip monies. Our Parent Club does the annual gift wrap fundriaser in September and all of this money goes into the fieldtrip catagory, but we write our check to the District and are done with it. Any money not used or allocated to be used by a specific date in April comes back to the Parent Club to be used in our general fund. The district office has a paid accountant to keep tract of this type of thing and by having the district write the check to bus compaines, than anything that could go wrong would be on the school insurance and or the bus insurance, not us. We realize that if someone really wanted to sue us, they could. But at least we would not be first on the list.
I would think the school should be responsible for doing this (ours does). I know some PTOs pay for field trips, but that would be a different case. Your PTO isn't paying- the parents are paying and you're just collecting the money and sending in one big check to cover everything. Do I have that right?
Our PTO has a separate treasurer and checking account with the PTO EIN # for field trips. We collect all monies for the school for field trips and pay the buses and the museums. Here are the problems?
1. Are we as a PTO liable if any child gets hurt on one of the buses or at the museum since the check came from PTO account?
2. What do you do with the balance in this account at the school year end? How should the surplus be allocated? Who should pay if their is a loss?
It seems to me that the school should handle all of this. The revenue generated from this account boosts our revenue over $100,000 on our tax return.
