Actually, I tend to agree with bucksco's orginal posting. We were always very open about spending, itemized budgets available at meetings or for anyone who asked.
But as far as snippets for a newsletter or announcements at a meeting, too detailed information - taken out of context - didn't work well. For those situations, it was better to focus on the accomplishments and general expenditures.
If the POINT of the newsletter was the budget - like maybe an summary of spending for the year, perhaps that's different. But to just state, we spent "XYZ" on Teacher Appreciation or on Speaker X wouldn't be my first choice. As a singled out data item, it doesn't have much value and tends to confuse people.
Purely my opinion, of course. You are all welcome to yours!
I'm coming up with a "State of the PTO" edition of our Bobcat Prints this April--I'll let you know when it is posted so you can see (if you care too) how I end up putting out the information you've discussed. I understand your hesitation and sometimes it is hard for folks to hear the cost and not understand the context. We do about 4k a year in "appreciation" but that includes everyone in the school from the cafeteria to the janitors to the teachers and administrators and truly--everyone FEELS appreciated. Were someone to just read that byline in our budget however, they might think we were off our rockers. True the information is there at every meeting, however sometimes a little bit of information can be dangerous. I agree however, that if you have nothing to hide then don't hide anything and I can personally handle the questions etc if anyone comes to me with frustration. We had one mom who was new to the school that was upset that we spent 12k on our outdoor classroom. With that money, she rightly pointed out, we could have adopted every classroom for 500 dollars. When I explained that we also have a very healthy adopt a classroom program (30 classrooms adopted this year) and that the 12k was raised as a specific program line, she felt better as did I for being able to explain our expenditure.
Bottom line: it may be a bit uncomfortable to explain everything (even if you have done everything right there will still be some nay sayers)but to not disclose everything and have it "leaked" in a way that is a discredit to your organization is much more harmful.
d
Thanks for the points of view. I guess from experiance I know the ones who do complain about such things are the loud ones who don't want to be involved anyway and I was trying to shield myself from them - my bad. We send home our budget breakdown atleast twice a year and it is posted on our website. We have compaints from some that we send home too much information and complaints from others that we don't send home enough.
We began to itemize last year at our school. We sent a letter home in the fall explaining the PTO, what we do, how we go about doing it and how those funds are spent. The parents loved it! They had felt in the dark for many years since they previously had a woman chair the PTO for 5 years straight and she was very general with the information.
Of course, we have had a couple grumblings about what we've spent on a given assembly or project (there is always gonna be one..or two) but we go with the majority response (through surveys and asking at our meetings what they - the parents - would like to see) which has been thumbs up on what we spend and how we spend it.
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it" - Ferris Bueller
