I think each of your School Site Councils should be contacted. They make recommendations to your school boards and I think that if you partnered with them you might be able to accomplish a bit more than trying to pay for aides yourselves.
I haven't read the other post so forgive me if I am off base. I need to vent a little any how.
Our Governor is proposing some MAJOR cuts in every level off education. I am a college student, I am a sub aide, and most importantly I am a mother of 2 elementary children. Apparently he is cutting some major grants that greatly help our poverty level counties. (Which is probably a large % of our counties).
I've always said I want my tax dollars to go toward text books and teachers pay and not the fun stuff. That is what I felt the PTO is for. We provide alot of opportunities for our kids as a PTO and we partner with other groups too. These groups are facing termination. We are losing a major grant that helps our whole county, plus our Gov. wants to take away our ESS, Family Resource Center, and pre-K. This is what will be most impacted in our county any how. Now I am thinking what can the PTO do to subsidize these programs? Would paying for an aide be so bad? Right now I am too upset to know what to think. I thought this governor would change things for the better and this has really been a slap in the face. But I would favor our PTOs paying funds out to keep these projects going. I really wouldn't like it that much. But I feel that our kids need these programs and I would rather see that to happen then be totally dismissed.
I, too, am of a different opinion. Our district has already cut budgets twice, and will do so again if the upcoming operating fails. We feel that as a PTO that we are there to provide what we feel is in the best interests of our kids.
First, we are not one of the schools that can raise $20k+ at each fundraiser. We do not have the funds to cover any salaries or what not. However, we will be looking at ways to keep the current programs that we provide to the kids (Publishing shop, Shoebox Science, Family Socials, etc.) while trying to help out the staff a little bit.
I think that people need to stand up for what they think is right. My opinion is that it is not right for a district not to give back funds if it becomes available, and the reason for not doing so is because the PTO has covered these costs. If this were happening in our district, I would have a serious problem with this and would be telling anyone and everyone, then heading to Central Office to give them my 2 cents and then some.
I do have a problem with paying for someone's salary. How does one decide who to keep and who not to keep? I wish that building principals and higher ups would not permit that to happen. Our district is currently divided in many ways-including the familiar haves and have nots. This is just one more way to make that division clear.
Anyway, what I am trying to get at here is that we all need to remember why we are doing all of the fundraising and volunteering. We are doing all we can to provide our kids with many different opportunities. And, if that is the mission of your organization, then I think that a group should find a way to help make ends meet.
Smiles,
Jen
P.S. Our school also has one of those coding copiers. We have not ever paid to make copies at school, but this is one thing that I will be bringing up at our next meeting.
Relying on a non profit, donation based organization that has no set income to formally dedicate itself to a recurring expense is the question here.
Where will the money come from and what happens if you do not get enough to pay the bill?
We have a couple of obligations along these lines ourselves so I can not advise against doing it. We did however go through several steps to approve them.
Example: We recently authorized and are in the process of obtaining all the equipment to become a publisher. This will result in a monthly expense of $225.00. We have one monthly activity that we take this much (actually more) that we have allocated (dedicated) the monies from to pay for this. Before we approved this we had the proposer put together a cost analysis and a ROI (return on investment) analysis. The equipment ought to eventually pay for itself but we did not count on this in considering how we were going to pay that bill for the next 3 years, you cant, it is not money in the bank, until you have a track record demonstrating that.
We too are faced with growing costs and corporate budget cut backs. We have also recently proposed and have tabled a resolution to comit another group of monies to offset the purchase of various support items (print cartidges mostly) to prevent the school from having to charge a student fee. We have a recurring source for this money and I see that once it is back on the table it will be approved in time for the next school year. Again it is going through the process of analysis though. Are we sure future PTOs can pay for this?
As a general rule of thumb I would advice against comitting more than 20% of known monies to this sort of allocation for any non profit school organization. This is because of all those little things that you do that arent down on paper as an allocated expense or budget item. It also prevents you from over committing and creating a new set of problems.
Keep in mind you are a business, but a business without a product for sale, that relies on donations from others to obtain the financing to do the things you want to do. You have no real idea how much you will take in in a given year, you can speculate, you can estimate on past performance, but performance is as much a product of who is running something like a back pack fundraiser as it is the "product" you are trying to get people to buy! Just because that chocolate sale was great this year because you were running it does not mean you will even break even next year when someone else is running it.
If you have monthly recurring activities that raise a set amount (averaged over a period) then you can look to those to be the source for allocating an item. Much beyond that though it becomes a guessing game and if you guess wrong once it is the credibility of the organization that suffers as well as the potential credit rating.
These things will transend the terms of the officers approving them, so I would advise a full discussion of comitting future organizations to doing this. I can not think of a worse situation for the school than to have a new board voted in and the first meeting of the new school year they decide that they dont want to buy paper for the school this year that was committed to by the board 2 years before! They would fully be in their rights to deny this expense, but I am not so sure it would create an air of copperation not to mention it may cause some conflict with the Principal.
I'm amazed as to the money provided by the parent groups here. An air conditioner or a load of wood chips is one thing, but surveillance equipment? Copy machines? Computers? Aides??? I can't believe districts are that bad off that the VOLUNTEER parent group has to subsidise the personnel and major equipment budgets. There are state and federal grants for most of this stuff. These aren't things a parent group should be responsible for. We hope to be around as long as our schools, but what if we aren't?
I guess I am of a different opinion (to a certain degree). If for some reason there are special circumstances during a year and the PTO has the finances, I see no problem with helping to fill in the gaps, or applying these "bandaids". Our school suffered a cut last year (it was a one time cut and the funds were returned this year) and the PTO was asked to help in a number of ways, from buying an air conditioner to restocking the woodchips on the playgrounds. We had the money, it was a need for our children, so we did it. I might add, it was not a mandate from our principal, it was a request. We also purchased a high volume copier to cut the costs on other copying issues. This year we supplemented the schools security budget by several thousands of dollars in order to get surveillance eqipment installed. Part of the money was available, just not enough to completely cover the school and buses. We are the ones who fully stock the clinic. I don't mind the PTO filling in where needed, even if it's something that should be included in the budget. I dont consider it my job as the PTO to gripe about whether taxes are too high or not high enough or whether the school board is or is not doing its job (that's my duty as a citizen, but not as PTO pres). I consider it the PTO's job to get the teachers what they need in order to most benefit the students... regardless of if that item or items SHOULD have been provided by a different means.
