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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Doesn't your PTA have committee chairs for each event, and the other executive board members are in other roles, such as communication and support?  This is how our PTAs are structured, and I don't feel that events overshadowed other parts of our mission.

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Our PTA sponsors like 20 events throughout the school year, there's no way to have a separate committee chair for each event. It's a huge job to put them on and while there's an events chair, the rest of the PTA board including the president dedicate a lot of man hours to the events. The president has told me that event execution is fully half of her job, maybe more, even though it's the part she likes the least.[/quote]

20 events?  Unless this is a K-12 where events are for different divisions this seems like an enormous number.  [/quote]

It absolutely is enormous. The problem is that nothing ever comes off the schedule. A few of these are revenue-generating and I get wanting to have maybe 2-3 school-based festival type events throughout the year to give families a chance to be present and facilitate relationships and school spirit. But our school does like 4-5 fundraisers (one really big one and then several more scattered through the year), I think 6 family night type events (think bingo night, international night, literacy night, etc.), a series of "parent socials" where the PTA provides childcare and parents can socialize, and a couple more smaller things. It's a lot but my understanding is that whenever they suggest scaling back, someone says "no we can't stop doing X event, it's a tradition" so they never do.

They never have enough volunteers, the PTA is really overworked, and it's getting hard to recruit people to take on PTA roles because it's such a heavy lift. I know I have no interest. But we also don't attend most of this stuff so I don't feel guilty. We make 3 or 4 of the family nights throughout the year and I'll write a check for the fundraiser but we don't go, and that's it. My acquaintance is the PTA president and I know she is drowning and I feel bad for her but it's clear the problem is they need to streamline and no one is willing to do it.[/quote]

This is how it is at our school too. There’s a Halloween/Fall festival, two Bingo nights, a big spring festival, 2-3 movie nights on the blacktop, a donut/breakfast event, and the school social worker/family liaison separately organizes events without the PTA - International Night and science night usually. Then some years there’s also a kids shopping/holiday market and a spring fun run during the school day, which is separate from the school’s Field Day. There’s also a monthly restaurant fundraiser, and a fall and spring fundraiser.

The thing is all these events are VERY well attended and usually get just enough volunteers to help with, like, day of ticket sales, set up/clean up, concession stand, etc. But the planning is SO MUCH WORK. And either the small PTA board of 4-5 people does all the planning (and also volunteers day of) or they can try to outsource the planning to event-specific planning committees but then you run the risk of those folks dropping the ball on planning since they aren’t as familiar with it. It’s not a good situation either way.

And yes there has been push back from teachers/staff and parents about cutting back on some of the events. Bingo night is the pet event of one of the experienced and well-liked teachers. The fall and spring events bring in a lot of vendors and small businesses from the community who get salty if their DJ company isn’t booked for that random Friday afternoon/evening or if the lady who sells (insert random thing) out of her house isn’t invited to sell at the event she’s been coming to since before Covid. The breakfast event is there to celebrate the military since they do it during April and we have a large number of military-connected families. Etc. etc. It’s really the event planning that is the huge time and effort. [/quote]

Way too many night activities. Are these all weeknights? I'm surprised you can get people to drop everything so many nights a year. [/quote]

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