We have a company that does this for the school and all the profits go to the school. I'll see what I can find out about the name of the company. However, we are a very low income school, and last year, volunteers were almost non-existant. This art company puts pictures the kids have drawn into nice back frames with a white matt and sets them up on display for $30.00 each, along with ones the teachers have done also. The line was down the hall at the cash register. I mean to tell you, parents were buying them left and right. I mentioned to one parent it would be a good mother's day gift for a grandma, and she bought 3 at $30.00 each. This was a parent who probably hadnt spent $30.00 in all of the other fundraisers combined! I left that night in pure amazement. This company provided the school with the paper for the pictures. The art teacher had the kids work on their pictures, and then she mailed them to the company. They scanned the pictures into their computers, creating a postcard with a small original on it and sent this home to the parents as advertisement. If a parent wanted more than one copy, they pre-paid for them, and the company printed them out, framed them and mailed them to the school for no charge, or to the home for $5.95. It was kind of frustrating to watch so much money go to such a simple idea.

why not ask your local art stores, large and small, if they would like to donate money to your project in exchange for mention in your newsletter or some other sort of recognition.

We're in the process of organizing our annual auction and we'll be auctioning off "class and grade projects". We are running into problems because teachers do not want to do a project unless the PTO or parent volunteers do everything for them. That makes it hard because we are already spread thin as it is. Anyway, some of the ideas we are trying to do is a cookbook, quilts, picture collages, and others (I'm still brainstorming). If anyone else has other ideas, I'm open to them too.

1 thing we've done is have a Student Art Contest. The winner gets to get his/her design printed on T Shirts. We've done this 2 ways - once for Field Day, where the PTO Purchases the Shirts for all the students. That was so popular that this year, we ran a 2nd contest and had the winner's design imprinted on a School Spirit T Shirt. In this case, the Order Forms went home with the students and everyone had an option to purchase. This was done as a fundraiser. For the shirts, we used www.spirit-wear.com Great job and very good prices.

Does anyone have experience in organizing a sale or auction of student's art work? I thought this may be a unique way to raise some much needed art class funds. Please share. Thanks!