Is there a way you could maintain the District's view of the council (and their goodwill) but supplement it with some activities of your own? As time goes by you might also be able to take a more active role in the Council. Does it have officers? Can you (or others) influence the agenda.

One of the easiest starting points would be to create a Google or Yahoo Group. Get the parent group leaders to subscribe and you can have instant communication across your organizations. As a particular need develops, you could host special meetings or "sub committee meetings" that supplement the quarterly Council sessions.

I'd encourage you to find a collaborative way to grow this. I think you'll get more benefit all the way around.

Okay, this is probably going to be a bit long, as it requires a bit of background. Apologies in advance :o

Our school district has formed something of a council made up of board members from all of the district's parent groups. Participation is extremely low and it only meets 3-4 times per year. The district employees in charge of it set the agenda, and sometimes invite community groups to come in and make presentations to us. We've asked them before for permission to set up a forum or mailing list to facilitate us communicating with each other, but they've always been very resistant to the idea, and we've all just let it go.

Up until now, I think that most of us were willing to let things continue in this vein, even if we didn't love it, because we're all busy and didn't have to organize it and we usually aren't in an adversarial relationship with the district. But enter budget cuts, an attempt by the district to regulate what parent groups can pay for, allusions to policies and procedures that none of us have ever even known existed, and the relationship is fraying and becoming adversarial.

After today's very heated meeting ended, I asked the assembled groups if anyone else would be interested in meeting more frequently than we currently do and trying to do more to exchange ideas, etc. I mentioned nothing about "ganging up" against the district, but when the district staff member heard what I was asking she became pretty irate. We waited for her to leave to continue our discussion, but the general consensus is that we do want to form our own council independent of the district, but none of us are really sure of the nuts and bolts of how to go about it without involving the school district.

I've read the article on this site about regional councils, but it seems to focus on groups that do coordinate with their districts, so it isn't providing much help or guidance.

So this very long winded post was really just to ask if anyone has any information on how to start a regional council without district support. We know that we could go the PTA Council route, but that would exclude a lot of our district's parent groups, and this is most definitely a bad time for us to be anything but united.

Thanks in advance!

~Lisa