PTO Today

Parent groups often buy classroom supplies and special equipment for schools, but as districts across the country face severe budget cuts, some PTOs are shelling out thousands of dollars just to keep programs afloat.

The bailouts raise questions about what parent groups should pay for and what should come from schools. Then there’s the issue of equity: In a publicly funded school system, is it fair for one school to have extras others don’t because a PTO pays for them? Wherever you fall on the issue, it’s hard to argue with the efforts of the following groups!

Field Trips
When the Eau Claire (Wis.) Area School District cut field trip funding, the Eau Claire United PTA/PTO set a goal to raise $70,000 to pay for the outings. The group started its campaign in August 2009 and reached its goal the following June. The United PTA/PTO raised money through corporate sponsorships, a radio telethon, restaurant nights, and other fundraisers. The group has already started raising money to support field trips for this school year. Parents are continuing to lobby the school board to restore funding.

Learning Labs
Parents credit the technology and science programs at Fremont Elementary in Long Beach, Calif., with helping students achieve high test scores. They have been keeping the programs afloat since losing district funding in 2004. In June, the PTA announced that it had raised $60,000, to be matched by a local company whose owner has a grandchild at the school. The funds will keep the programs going this school year.

Spend any time on our message boards and you soon learn that there are some very knowledgeable and considerate PTO and PTA leaders out there. This is the reason we started the “This Post Rock” program — to recognize these wonderful community members.

Here is a top line of our most recent PTO Rock Stars’ posts:

• Three cheers for clnscheffer for contributing a fabulous idea for a classroom art project for school auctions and for uploading photos of the projects.
• Critter responded to a question about implementing  basic reimbursement rules with some thoughtful advice that could save your parent group a lot of angst.
• We appreciate Slvrdrgnflygrl’s detailed post on authors to contact for auction freebies but we also commend her on her words of encouragement that she offered. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that she was writing this post the day before her school auction… like she didn’t have a million other things to do besides pass along info to our community. Amazing.
• Gmparkes post is short and sweet but it points to a bunch of files that he uploaded to our file exchange to help others working on festivals and carnivals. (See the post after his for links to these files.) We greatly appreciate when folks upload files to our File Exchange and we bet you do too. Nothing like saving hours in a project.
• When a community member vented about lack of meeting attendance barb_r not only offered some words of encouragement but she hunted down some articles and blog on our site that she thought would be helpful. Hey wait, isn’t that my job?! Thanks Barb!

Well done PTO Rock Stars. Thanks for all you do to make our community a wonderful place to share and get ideas and support!

No one likes to talk about embezzlement from PTOs or PTAs, but the reality is that no group is immune to theft. The good news is,  it is easily preventable.  Watch Tim’s video blog this week to learn how to protect your group.

Related links:

http://www.ptotoday.com/pto-today-articles/article/391-handling-cash-6-simple-steps

http://www.ptotoday.com/pto-today-articles/article/395-5-smart-financial-controls

http://www.ptotoday.com/insurance/index.php

An article titled  “Parents Help Save Sports Program” caught my eye today. Yet another reminder that school budgets are tight everywhere. Schools and communities are being forced to get creative with funding. In this case, the PTO came forward and offered to pay for a portion of a sports program. No surprise that the board took them up on the offer. This scenario begs the question: what should PTOs pay for? The answer gets a little fuzzy in tight economic times, doesn’t it?  Something to consider though– when your group decides to fund a program or a position, are you setting a precedent? Can your group maintain this funding in years to come, if need be? There are many signs that the economy is improving. When funding improves, will you still be expected to fund the program that you rescued?

There are no easy answers.  What do you think  parent groups should pay for?

OK, guys, time for my annual plea — please, please take these simple steps to protect your finances:

1. Make a rule that someone besides your treasurer receives and opens the bank statement each month. Temptation is much greater if a financially struggling treasurer knows she can write a check to cash and then just rip it up when it comes back from the bank.
2. Have an audit committee that will review the books at least once per year. (It can be all volunteers; doesn’t need to be accountants.)
3. Get bonding insurance. It’s cheap, it provides real protection, and it’s worth it.

Just this month, there has been another flurry of embezzlement stories from school parent groups. A PTA treasurer in California admitted she stole $35,000. And in Kentucky, a PTO president was charged with taking $10,000. We’ve seen dozens of these every year since PTO Today started in 1999.

The key to keeping your group out of these headlines is to make it much more likely that a misdeed will be noticed. The typical culprit in these crimes is a very normal volunteer, often in financial stress, who notices how easy it would be to “borrow” some funds for a while. I can’t recall a single embezzle case (or a big loss) in a group that followed the above steps.

Final plea: If you’re a treasurer, will you please make instituting these steps your job? Sometimes leaders worry they’ll be insulting their treasurer if they ask about these matters. You can solve that easily by taking on the task yourself. (And consider adding a few more easy-to-follow finance best practices while you’re at it.)

Has your group struggled with this issue? Or put some good controls in place? Would love it if you’d share your feedback and experience on our message boards.

This week’s round-up features the fun and not so fun.

First the fun. At PTO Today we talk a lot about how important it is to infuse some fun into your parent group. Well, these groups certainly seem to have the fun factor figured out.

• Nothing like some good-natured competition to liven up a school community:  Iron Chef competition.
• This PTO is giving families a chance to get creative with an all-day scrapbooking event.
• Families at this school love their Spaghetti dinner family night tradition. Sometimes it’s the old fashioned favorite that is the most fun.
• Getting high schoolers on board with a fundraiser can be a bit tough. This NJ PTO figured out a fun event to do the trick: a fashion show fundraiser. Loved that they involved the students by sponsoring a contest for the invitation. Neat idea.
• This school combined a  school carnival with a silent auction and had over 1000 attendees. Wow, that says a lot about the community!

Ok, now for the not-so-fun. Speaking to the need of solid financial controls in your parent group, there were several stories in the news this week about embezzlement:

Woman pleads guilty to $35,000 PTA theft.

PTA treasurer sentenced to three years of probation for stealing nearly $75,000 over a six-year period.

Ex-PTA president sentenced for stealing funds.

I continued to be inspired by the creative ways that parent groups raise money and/or create a sense of community at their schools. Here a few of my favorite event articles in the news this week:

School Family Events:

Enthusiasm is the key ingredient in this parent group-sponsored math night.

PTO runs a fitness day where football rules.

Creative PTO party animals set the stage for success.

Teachers & parents with talent serve up plenty of inspiration at this school!

Loved this PTA event that encourage middle schoolers to honor family history.

And it always saddens me to post articles about thefts from parent groups but they certainly serve as good reminders for PTOs & PTAs to employ smart financial controls.

Parent Group Thefts:

http://www.brainerddispatch.com/stories/020510/new_20100205001.shtml

http://www.indystar.com/article/20100127/LOCAL1804/1270354/Maplewood-Elementary-PTO-chief-jailed-in-theft

Has your parent group been in the news and you’d like to share your story with other leaders? Email me at lgundlach@ptotoday.com and I’ll include it our weekly round-up.

Save time!

Just wanted to give everyone a heads-up that we have reorganized the popular File Exchange section of our site. We’ve added new categories, renamed a few, and moved around a bunch of files that were getting lost — so leaders can easily find the forms, flyers, letters, and surveys that they need. Hopefully, the changes will also take the guess work out of where to put something when you upload files to share with others.

Some new categories include:

• volunteer recruitment
• fundraiser forms & letters
• fun run, walk-a-thon
• spaghetti dinner
• holiday shops
• audits
• community service

New file additions of note include a slew of generic parent group logos and a new email opt-in form.

Thank you to all who have uploaded documents to share with fellow parent group leaders. We hear from leaders all the time that the file exchange is such  a powerful resource.  Happy sharing and swapping!

Which one did you use this fall?  Which one is the best choice for your group?

This is always a big discussion on our message boards and in our PTO Today community, mainly because the differences are so stark.  I recently received an email about this topic from an expert that brought a fundamental new concern into the debate.  I’ll explain below.

First, to set the table what we’re talking about here,  is whether you should run your fundraiser so that all sales are paid for up-front (pre-pay) or whether you should take orders and then collect money only at delivery time (post-pay).

I can give you three facts in this debate:

1. Almost all group will make more profit with post-pay– usually a lot more.

2. You will likely have a bounced check or two or get beaten in another way in post-pay (though #1 still applies).

3. There’s some extra work involved with post-pay, as sellers need to go back and collect money at delivery time.

This expert I heard from – a long-time salesman in the fundraising business – gave this perspective:

“A postpay sale is going to generate some “no pay” sales.  That’s a given as “the cost of doing business.”  It is also true that a postpay sale generates approximately double the sales volume of a prepay sale.  As an example, (one of my schools) had a total sales of about $4,500 on their prepay fall fundraiser in 2007.  They switched to postpay in 2008 and had a total sales of over $20,000.  They more than quadrupled the fundraiser profit that they could spend on behalf of the children, and did it with the same size of enrollment.  Yes, it takes a little effort to collect all the money, but they liked the additional money so much that they are doing a postpay sale again this fall.

A second reason relates to the issue of trust.  When parents are told they must have the money up front, they are reluctant to ask their co- workers to buy, lest the co-worker be insulted, thinking that the parent doesn’t trust them.  An even worse situation is one where a school will not accept checks at all. This indicates a severe lack of trust and is pretty much guaranteed to make parents decide not to participate at all.   If you have less than half the parents participating on a fundraiser, you have a lack of trust on the part of the parents in the school administration, simply because the parents feel that they are not trusted.”

The new factor for me was a discussion of how our credit card and debit card and online banking society has made prepay so difficult. Years ago in a prepay sale, the neighbor or co-worker or aunt or uncle pulled out a check and paid for their order on the spot.  Today, I haven’t carried a check in my wallet in several years, and I rarely have more than $20 or $30 in cash in my pocket. Many days, I couldn’t help the prepay seller, even if I wanted to.  The stats show that I’m far from alone in using plastic and online banking (and few paper checks) in my daily routine. This is a huge factor making prepay so difficult.

Hadn’t thought of that.

I’m interested in your take and your experiences on this. Did you prepay or postpay this year? Seeing any trends at your school? Love to hear ‘em.

PS – Are you following us on twitter yet?  @TimPTO and @ptotoday.

Every school year we read about new cases of embezzlement from parent groups. Sadly, in this case it’s a principal that is at the center of the alleged theft of PTO funds. Ugh.  Hate to hear these stories, especially when they are preventable.

With the new school year, it’s a good time to take a good look at your PTO group’s financial controls.  What are you doing to prevent theft? Does your group have insurance?  Is an annual audit part of your group’s standard procedures? Please take the time to read these articles and review your systems. It is our sincere hope that this information will reduce the number of thefts this school year.