Thanks for your response however it was not a one day notice, please allow me to correct and elaborate, we have it posted over a month in advance then we sent fliers home both through e-mail blasts as well as web site updates. Then we do a hard push the week of mostly the last day or two before the meetings reason being as you stated (Jewel) parents are busy and do forget so we hit them the day of and the day before. I do agree that we might not need to use the urgency in the next blast but we are thinking outside the box. We may use similar wording but you are right. Our general idea is to get the parents out and inform them of what the PTO is trying to do and what we are doing for our children. Thanks Jewel for your comments and insight!
I don't recommend not giving parents one day's notice (or less). People are busy and appreciate having as much notice as possible.
And, when you're thinking outside the box, be careful with using alarmist hyperbole in your flyers (i.e. "Be at the PTO meeting tonight because you would not believe what the PTO is trying to do to our children") as it will backfire on you when parents realized it was just a come-on and not an actual urgent situation needing their immediate attention.
Being a new president (and brand new PTO) believe it or not has its good and bad however our first meeting we barely had 10 people to show up so my team and I went to the thinking block and the first thing we did was of course find out what time worked best for our parents and we changed the time. Then we put out fliers the day before. Now this part here I think was key. Normally we do phone blasts the day before from the School, this time what we did was we sent out the phone blast the day of the PTO meeting after 5 PM and we did a second phone blast from me personally after 5:30. Well I guess you could say it was a grass roots effort because attendance swelled to 60+ parents, several new members to the PTO. This time we are going to put out fliers that read "Be at the PTO meeting tonight because you would not believe what the PTO is trying to do to our children" We are really thinking out side the box. Also I was told by several parents that they really appreciated the fact that we started on time and ended promptly on time. Which was kind of funny because we had parents getting there in the last 10 - 15 minutes apologizing and saying they would be there on time next time. Good Luck!
I can also sympathize. We just had a meeting last Thursday & only had 6 parents show up. We send notices home, also have facebook setup, provide dinner for our families and have also done raffles to no avail. One thing that has worked for us in the past is when we involve the children. Tell them the class with the most parents to come out will receive something. In our school it used to be scholar dollars. Whats frustrating to me is when I hear parents complain or say they didn"t know about something when they don't show up to meetings to try & make a change or just be involved.
This can be such a hard thing. I have been on the PTO for 5 years. Most of the time we have only the PTO members and a few teachers. I really pushed and ended up with 20 show up to our first meeting. We have tried everything to try and boost people coming to meetings. We have brought in food, asked parents what they want for a subject for a guest speaker, encouraged them to bring their kids, and now changed the meeting time. We only meet quarterly because monthly meetings were almost down to noone. We do a connect ED and call parents the day befoire and a not goes home as well. We have evern gone as far as setting up a facebook site for our school. We continue to try to encourage parents to come to the meetings to help make decisions for thier children's school. All we can do is try and otherwise, the rest of us do what we do to make it work and keep plugging on as we do year after year....the bad part is what happens when we are all gone????? We face that when we get there!
