Tax laws vary from state to state and I'm no expert. Our PTO picks up the taxes for the stuff the kids buy. Items teachers buy for classroom use are tax-free. We pass along the 30% discount to the kids, too. This does get confusing when it comes to filling out the financial form, so I call Scholastic and they walk me through it.

Did any of you just recieve a letter from Scholastic re: taxes. It appears we now have to collect taxes at book fairs. Is this correct? That will be a nightmare. I am thinking I like the idea of the used book fair. We give the money we make to our librarians and they purchase new books for the libarary. Maybe we should just use the profits from the used book fair to buy new books for the library.

To the individual that is on the Scholastic Board, I would suggest you recommend to them, that they read these postings. A lot of time this info never gets to the people who can make a difference.

We have used Scholastic for several years for our fundraisers and this was the first year that I organized a book fair for our school. I found our reps to be very good about answering questions and just being available. The problem that I had with Scholastic was that the tax exempt issue is as clear as mud and no one there even seems to know what to do with it. We ended up not charging any tax and just kept our figures crossed. The only other issue that I had was that there weren't many books that were offered for under $2.00. The teacher's send out the forms every month and you could always find at least a couple for $.99. I spoke to our rep after the fact and she said that we could request some "bruised books" which are the ones that they sell for $.99 but we would maybe only get a small box of them if any at all. I think they need to add more of those books to the fair even though we wouldn't make any money from them. I had many children who came to shop with $1.00 and all I could offer them was some dumb erasers. We took book profit instead of cash profit and we had over $3000 to spend in books. We gave books to each classroom as well as books for our library. The book profit option was our best choice. I agree that the items in the resource catalog are more expensive than other places but still felt that the best interest of the school was served by not taking a cash profit. We will try Scholastic again in the Spring as it looks like there aren't many other options out there. Kim....St. Aloysius School

Scholastic's customer service must vary from region to region. We hear from our reps a lot. We have pretty sucessful fairs, so that probably is part of their incentive to keep in touch.
We also run our fairs as a service, rather than a fundraiser.

Good point -- our Scholastic books fairs turned into a service for the kids/families. Because of the poor inventory and high prices, it certainly was not a fundraiser.

Interesting tid bit - for the '04-05 school year, we did not hold any Scholastic book fairs. Our rep called a few times back in September. We haven't heard from her again.

If Scholastic wasn't the primary game in town, their customer service would run them out of business.

Our principal is quite set on very few fund-raisers, so we do many activities and events at no or little profit. Our Elementary School has a diverse economic status for the families, so we do not make money from the Scholastic Book Fair.

We use the book credits so that each student gets a book at Christmas time and at the end of the school year. We also allow each teacher to get a free book (up to set amount) at each Book Fair. If we get a new teacher (new to teaching), we increase the number of books for that teacher so that he or she can begin to develop their classroom library.

We also hold our book fairs during the week of parent-teacher conference nights. We also put a limit on the amount of "stuff" that is put out. We found that the parents sent in money for their child to buy a book during the before school sale, but the kids were buying erasers, posters etc. The parents were unhappy. We put the emphasis on books.

If the teachers have too many book credits from the monthly book sales via the send home from the order lists, then the teachers know which of their students cannot afford books and just give that child the extra books.

So, in short, we view the book fair as a service to the students and families and teachers and not as a fundraiser.