As a business owner, copy machines are expensive and a huge pain. Seems to need constant attention - unjam, add toner, adjust, repair. . . . You would be taking on a major task.
I'm just shocked that all of your schools charge you for copies. Our Principal considers PTO an important part of the school and allows us to make all copies on the school machines. If we take big orders to the district print shop, he lets us put it on his monthly bill. We do donate 5 or 6 cases of paper to the school each year to offset the paper we use. Note to self: Thank the principal today!!
Our PTA considered buying or leasing a copy machine, but decided that it was more cost effective to pay for the printing. If you consider the cost of paper +toner+maintenance you have to be running *a LOT* of copies to justify the cost. Our board made a conscious decision at the outset that we were going to publish a newsletter only 4 times during this school year, and we have stuck to our guns. To get our message out, we have a website that costs us $49.00 per year which we are encouraging parents to use to save paper. A number of years ago, our PTA purchased a reader board (with the approval of our principal) for the school, which has been tremendously effective for meeting and event reminders. The previous post by dlf is a good suggestion if you have strong financial support from your parents, but I don't know if most public schools have that kind of ongoing support. Good luck!
We also lease a machine and then ask for donations in return for acknowledgement on the back of our newsletter. It works well and we actually purchase all our paper through the donations that run their ads with us. Everyone wins.
Have you looked into leasing a copy machine? Our school does that and the PTO pays for the service contract on it. We decided this is better than buying one as there are so many people who use it daily that it would be broken constantly and more expensive in the long run to repair it if we owned it. Good Luck!
This is something that we've been considering as well. We use the district print shop and pay the bills to them. So our plan has been to add up all of our printing costs for the fiscal year when we close out the books in June. Then we'll figure out how many copies we paid for and how much that amount of paper would cost us and combine that with the amount we'd pay for a machine and a year's supply of toner to determine whether or not we would definitely come out ahead to purchase our own machine. The big thing is not to forget about the cost of replacement toner and paper. I'll try to remember and post again in June to let you know what we ultimately figure out.
