Our money is raised by the kids and families, and not everyone would agree on who is most deserving, so we stick with benefitting the school as a whole financially. Most of our events are free or minimal cost. We do some programs during school, so everyone gets to participate. We help pay for field trips and have a scholarship fund for the 6th grade camping trip, as well as giving them opportunities to raise their own money.
On a volunteer basis, we provide oppurtunities to help needy families. Our councelor is very resource-savvy, and helps a lot of students by having Thanksgiving baskets, angel trees, etc. that we contribute to individually, not from the PTO money. Our school is starting a program to provide kids with food for the weekends, sending it home in special backpacks. The school is doing a food drive to get it started. The PTO will provide volunteers, not financial backing as of yet (they haven't asked). We've helped with fundraisers for families with emergencies. Our focus is on great school experiences, not helping individual families financially, but we recruit volunteers to help when needed.
This is great! This subject just came up at our Elementary school where we now want to address it over the summer for the start of next year...
I love the Heart to Heart idea....and can't wait to read the rest! Thank you PTO TODAY!
John Burroughs PTA has a small budget where we will purchase coats, uniforms, clothing, etc. for students who are really small or really large.
The school system has a state homeless partnership that provides coats to our school every year (most states have them) and we also have business partners, specifically two churches who collect coats, hats, scarves from their congregation and give them to us. When the school year begins we ask all the parents to please bring in there clean, gently worn, too small coats and they can swap out there childs coat for a new on or one that has been donated. There are no stipulations for getting a coat and if they don't have one they can still come and get one.
Our parents are also asked to bring in clean clothes, new socks, underwear, etc and every Friday, we put all the clothes out and they can come and pick out whatever clothing items that they want for free. The teachers are allowed to come to the Parent Center and pick out clothing for students in their classrooms and if we don't have the size we purchase them from a set a side fund that we have in the PTA.
at the end of the season, we write letters to the retail stores and ask them to donate coats, clothing, etc and they will usually give us most of what we want and we store them until the next school year.
At the end of each school year we have an awards ceremony at the school where all of our benefactors receive recognition and an award.
Our PTO made the decision early on to never charge admission to any school activity or event, so every child could participate. (although 2 of our fundraisers do require admission). A lot of our families are of limited means. This year we had a food drive in conjunction with our tricky tray and were able to provide four families with enough food to get them through the holiday break.
We don't set aside money but 1 year we did a coat drive. This year we received a
flip-video from a company just as a gift to the PTO. It was a couple days before Christmas break so I asked a social worker on staff if she knew a child who might not get anything for Christmas, she came up with a name pretty quickly so we gave that child the flip-video. I try to make sure we help as much as possible even though we don't have the money to do so.
