I'm with Gary- now that more parents are on Facebook and know more about it they are not balking as much. We started one the end of last schoolyear and are looking forward to promoting at our back to school night as a way to say connected with what's going on and bond with other panther parents,. I say go for it!
I did not find it difficult. We did not ask permission fom our school, but they were aware of it and had no problem with it. It is 100% opt-in for parents so that was not an issue.
Our School Has a website and a FB account. I post day to day things on F/B for everyone to know. I ask them questions, like when we have our movie nights what would they like to see. Even tell them when we have things on sale at the school store. So far we have only 62 fans but when word gets out I hope more get into it.
We have a FB fan page for our school. It isn't necessarily run by the PTO, but I, as the volunteer webmaster, am an officer of the PTO. I handle our school's web site, FB page and Twitter account. We're trying a number of things to see how we can best communicate with our families.
Our Facebook page is up to about 50 fans. To the person who was thinking of going the way of a Group instead—the great thing about a fan page is that the updates show up in people's news feed, whereas posts to a group do not. We mostly use our FB page for reminders, quick updates (like, today's a snow day) and sometimes deals, like for required school supplies or Market Day's deals of the week.
I love the idea of putting our meeting minutes there. We post our PTO newsletters to the school web site, but I've been struggling with what to do with the meeting minutes. That may be an option.
I created a whole new Facebook account and then from there created the Facebook Group for our PTA. I did it this way so that future PTA officers could have access without having any disruption. I do not accept friend requests to the new Facebook account since I do not want to have to manage that and all it entails. I have a standard email reply that I use when I get friend requests. I am happy to email you that if you like. I set up the Group so that I am one of the administrators for it.
