PTO Today

We will be voting on some changes to our bylaws tonight. One important change is the amount of time an officer serves. Currently an officer serves 1 year then we vote. The proposed change is that an elected officer will serve 2 years then vote and officer may serve no more than a 2 year term in same position. My question is, when do the changes take effect. Are they immediately in effect and if so does that mean that the current officers will now finish out this year plus one more year and then we vote again?
We are also looking at changing the amount of money that can be spent without prior approval from PTO member vote from 100 dollars to 200 dollars. Will this be in effect immediatley also.
Thanks for all of your help. I may be making this more confusing than it should be.

Except for the term limit change, I would consider all other changes to be effective immediately.

The current officers ran and were elected for one-year terms. My question would be whether or not they could run again after this year. That would cause them to be in office for three years, which would be against the new bylaws.

Some bylaws may have a clause that says amendments take affect immediately while others may specify a time such as 30 days or at the start of the new school year. My last set of bylaws said nothing so we agreed that approved changes were immediate. I think it would be important to specify how it will be at your meeting so there are no assumptions or misunderstandings.

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“Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for awhile and leave footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same.”

The motion could either make the changes immediate or could apply only to positions elected in the next nomination/election cycle and later. Considering that your current slate of officers understood that they were agreeing to serve for only 1 year when elected, you may find resistance to a motion that doesn't grandfather their original term limit into this new motion.

To clarify, officers could serve no longer than 2 terms? (4 years if changed?)

I agree with CrewChief: the officers were elected to one-year terms. We changed the term of office in our by-laws and all the officers had to be re-elected subsequently -- but we don't have term limits. I think the limits you're proposing are too constricting: what if someone takes over as an officer mid-year, is that person then ineligible to run for a regular 2-year term? (I don't think you'd want to have the special election valid for 2 years such that one officer was out of sync with the rest.)

Could you change the language to say an officer who has served for more than one year (or 18 months?) is not eligible to run for that same position? Probably too late to change the wording, if you're voting tonight, though.

Another thought.....

Consider putting a limit on overall time on the board to prevent the same four or five people from simply rotating through the officer positions, essentially blocking anyone else from getting elected onto the board.

For example, state that they can only serve two consecutive years in any one position and four consecutive years as an officer. Once they take a break, they can go back and serve other terms.

While this isn't normally a problem for people with one or two kids in the school, folks with 3, 4, 5 kids could dominate the board for years.

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“Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for awhile and leave footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same.”

Thanks for everyones' input. We voted tonight and all changes were approved. The new term for officers will not take effect until the April 09 vote of officers. Just wanted to thank everyone for their input.
We also had voted and approved the go ahead to establish 501(c)3 status. Wish us luck and I know I will be posting questions regarding this.

Good luck! We just got 501c3 last month -- having applied back in March. We didn't take a vote on it, we just did it, since the IRS would say we either have to file as a non-profit or as a for-profit business.

One other thing to consider when forming or reforming your board. We have 5 positions. President, President elect who becomes President the following year. Secretary, Treasurer and General director. They are all 2 year terms with the President/President elect being one year each. We have the positons staggered (One year we elect a President elect and treasurer, the following year we elect a President elect, Secretary and General director) so that we don't have a whole new board every other year. This works great because there is always someone on the board who was there the previous year and knows how things are run.