All parents and guardians of Green Pines students are automatically members of the Green Pines PTO. We don’t charge dues or keep membership records, and all parents and staff members are welcome at all of our meetings and events.

The executive board holds monthly open meetings during the school year on alternating weekday evenings to accommodate a variety of schedules. We know parents might not be able to make every meeting, but our hope is that by varying meeting days, parents will be able to catch at least a couple of meetings throughout the year. We switched from morning to evening meetings many years ago to accommodate working parents.

Although these meetings are intended as a time for the executive board to conduct its business, we try to make time at the end of each meeting for questions and comments from our parent community.

We follow the guidelines established in our bylaws, which are based on a template that all Rockwood PTOs use. Information is distributed early in the second semester about open board positions, asking parents to contact the PTO president if interested in filling an available spot.

The bylaws require a proposed slate of officers to be published at least four weeks before the election/slate approval vote, which is typically held during the monthly April PTO meeting.

These are available on the calendar page of our website. Just click on the month and then the date of the meeting you’re interested in, and the agenda will appear in the information attached to that meeting.

PTO meets monthly in the Green Pines library during the school year, and all Green Pines parents and staff are welcome. We try our best to keep meetings to an hour, as we know everyone’s time is valuable.

That’s a great question, as each year we receive lots of ideas from parents, staff, and sometimes even students!

Since 2017 we’ve conducted an annual spring survey to understand what types of programming our community is seeking. Our PTO executive board then meets over the summer to review the survey results. As we develop our annual lineup of events, we focus on activities that are inclusive of our entire school community, so all of our families feel welcome.

We intentionally host at least one free event per semester, and we keep the price point of our other activities affordable for our families. In addition, we typically plan our major community events for Fridays or Saturdays, the days when we believe the most families are available. We rotate our monthly restaurant nights around the greater STL area so Green Pines families and staff who live outside Wildwood can participate too.

We also consider our volunteer base when planning activities and commit to hosting only the events for which we have enough volunteers. Some events sound amazing on paper but are extremely labor intensive in real life and simply would not be possible to execute given our limited volunteer base.