A little off the track but we are desperately searching for a way to raise funds without making our kids sales people. Our problem has been that every time we come up with something sort of unique, people hear about the success and suddenly everybody is doing it. Not to mention every organization in the world is selling stuff to make money and many of them at the same time as our sales. We just finished our fall fundraiser and it's half of what we made last year. We will have to cut programs and not do some of the things we planned for the year. I'm ready to chuck the product sales except for bookfairs, and spend more effort on events that are designed for family fun. Of course, that brings up the whole issue of getting volunteers to help. We are doing a family night this week that the parents claimed they wanted and I have two volunteers to help me on the one night-I needed 12!! I went with Tim's advice from his column this month and eliminated some of the events. I'm depressed and incredibly fed up!
Our school system has such a rule. Kids/Adults are not allowed to sell anything. No door to door sales or catalog sales etc. We only have one official fundraiser for the year. It is a Supper with Santa. The parents do all the work. We raise about $7,000 a year with this. We also receive the proceeds from school pictures and year books. (Yearbooks 0 income, pictures around $5,000) StudentsParents CANNOT be asked to pay for any field trips. The PTO funds them all. We are a title one school, but only by a few percentage points. We have a wide range of income levels. From the highest to the lowest. NO CHILD IS ALLOWED TO BE LEFT OUT FOR FINANCIAL REASONS.
The solution is called thinking out of the box. The problem with the pictures is that it is school generated not PTO - and you will have the added problem of having people decide in the fall if they are going to buy a year book in the spring. (Most people use the fall pictures for the annual or year book pictures). Normally the year book is a PTO function and the pictures are a school - the fall, spring and group.
I sense though there is much more here than just the photos. You are wondering why all these fund raisers going home with the kids! It is called back pack express and there are several threads on this board dealing with this issue, so I wont rehash them here.
I tend to agree with you and our PTO (with some exceptions) does also - so we have started trying to think out of the box as far as fund raisers go.
Trust me on this it is not as easy as one might think. You need at least one person dedicated to running things (micro manage), who is dedicated to the idea of limiting the back pack express to even begin to make it work, and you will have to get a lot of people involved that are hard to get involved to begin with.
The problem is as Tim pointed out one time - why should I take the time, effort and energy to do something different that will net me 10% of what doing it the other way while we go through this learning curve. Why should I settle for raising $500 doing a bake sale - when I can raise $5000 dollars doing a back pack express? And the vendor will do most of the work for me.
Much like others, our school pics do not go through the PTO. And, it's not just a matter of the haves and have nots. I would be considered part of the haves and never get the pics (my kid always seems to have a goofy look on his face). As for other activities, the PTO has a fund for field trips for children who would otherwise be unable to participate. The same goes for every other activity (art contest - we hand out supplies based on teacher recommendation, writing contest - we send home a notebook, fall festival - we hand out almost as many tickets as we sell). Almost everything else we try to keep at cost (yearbooks, tshirts, santa's workshop).
Our goal for what many consider fundraisers is to break even. When it comes to the book fair, the media director holds a "drawing" that assures targeted students from each room are the "lucky winners" in picking out a free book. Sometimes this is based on family financial need, other times it's based on other factors in order to foster an appreciation for reading in the home.
When it comes to the traditional fundraisers (one catalogue sale, two raffles) it's not the rich kids who come in with the big orders, it's the low income children. One mother came in with a $1k order and I was quite suprised. When I asked her about it she said quite simply that catalogue sales is something she can do. While she didnt buy anything for herself, she can work with her son to get from family member to family member.
It's hard for me to imagine that you have a school that DOESN'T have the policies that you would like to see. We have an incredibly diverse school - everything from extremely wealthy families to kids who get bussed in from other parts of town who have nothing. Children are never denied access to field trips - if the teacher knows they can't afford the trip then other parents give extra money. Usually the teacher quietly lets the room parent know and someone comes up with the cash. How is it that the kids know whether their parents bought pictures or not? We send home the proofs and everyone returns them - and the envelopes are sealed so no one knows. We give out free books at our book fair to kids who would not be able to afford them. The teachers are allowed to pick out the students who wouldn't get a book otherwise. Sometimes they offer books to all the kids on the free lunch program (which by the way is secret - since everyone uses pin numbers to pay,no one knows whose lunch is free). This sounds to me like it may be something your PTO group wants to discuss privately with the administration - ways you can level the playing field for all the kids. Offer to donate money to a fund to pay for these kids. Come up with a solution!
Thank you all for your replies. I will share them with others.
My initial interest was very simple: I don't think this is the biggest problem facing anyone. It simply seemed to me that rather than watch teachers come out of pocket constantly to buy things for kids and see parents sneak a little extra money in for "needy kids", maybe we ought to question what on earth we're doing setting ourselves up for such problems in the first place. This is *one* problem that we *can* fix... because we created it!
A regular dad like me is going to *give up* 99 times out of 100 when he comes up against this complicated maze of activities and all of the defensiveness that arises when you start questioning the way things are done. Most of us have bigger fish to fry and we just don't want to cause trouble where our kids go to school. Yes, I could compile a list of creative solutions ("work-arounds" actually) to mitigate the negative impact I see on the "have-nots" from all this well-intentioned activity, but who has the time and tenacity?
Couldn't these types of problems be solved with simple policies instead? Say, for example, you had three policies for elementary school: (1) No child shall be excluded from any activity for lack of ability to pay; (2) No child shall be included in activities in such a way that creates stigma or otherwise draws attention to his or her inability to pay; and (3) All school activities, including fundraisers, sales and special events shall be evaluated in light of policies 1 and 2?
Does anybody's school have policies like these in place that they could share? I don't mean to sound self-righteous... I figure I might as well be blunt since this is a message board!
