Hi, I am also a first time PTO president and have been thinking about this myself as we are having a welcome reception for our K parents. I guess as a parent attending the open house I wouldn't want to hear preaching about how great the PTO is or how much money we need to raise. I think I would concentrate more on the volunteer opportunities available in the school and for the PTO. I think it's important to acknowledge that it's difficult for working parents to attend meetings, and spend a great deal of time in the school due to other committments. I wanted to focus on the small things they can do such as bake for a bake sale, maybe read to their child's class, participate in night events such as reading nights etc or if they have time maybe come in and help out at the bookfair for an hour or in their child's classroom that's great too. My focus will be that any help big or small is hugely appreciated and means alot to their child. In my opinion these are the special times in their lives and in their education and learning also involves the family especially today with all that is expected of them! Good Luck with your speech!
Okay, so this is my first year as PTO president for my son's elementary school. And we have decided to do ice cream socials at all 3 of our open house nights coming up in Septemer. (One for Pre-K and K, one for gr 1-2, one for gr 3-5) After the principal welcomes everyone, the PTO gets to speak for a few minutes as sort of an introductory PTO meeting. My problem is, I have no idea what to say.
So what I would like to know is what would you say if you had 5 minutes in front of a capture audience of parents? What would you focus on? (Obviously the answer to this varies depending on what your organization needs). How would you make an impact? And what I really want to know is what have you said in the past that was the absolute WRONG thing to say?
