This is the first of 3 schools we have been involved with. They charged and I thought it was really sad to charge kids to get into their festival. You got nothing with your admission. It was $1 each or $5 for a family. Then they charged $8 for the arm bands. It was all you wanted to play. They also did the ticket items. Ours ran from 4-7 so we could sell some food to. All the food was things like pizza, burgers, fries, etc. For our family of 4 I spent $4 to get in another $10 on food and another $10 on raffle and chinese auction tickets, plus game money for 2 ( I skipped the arm bands because I was working half the festival and no kids were planning on staying. I think I spent $10 on games combined.) Plus donating a cake for the cake walk, etc. I did win stuff on the raffle, but had I not it would have been a fairly expensive 1 1/2 hours. I wish for the kids sake, they would have let us in free and had more money left to spend on games/ fun stuff for kids. I think the kids would have had a better time.
If I had known about the admission before the day of the festival, we wouldn't have gone. I am very opposed to charging people to come in and spend money. It wasn't like anything was free there to feel the need for an admission. Also, if parents just wanted to spend say $10 it was impossible because after the $8 arm band you didn't have enough left to pay for your families admission!
Ours is more of a party but we have games and prizes. We don't charge either and this year we had decorate your own cupcakes and popcorn and juice. We also did it after dinner.
We have no charge on anything. Food this year was make your own trail mix (pretzles, goldfish, m&M's , Chocolate chips, cherrioes, chesseballs,cheeze it crackers, Etc) and A cookie witches hat. We do ours from 6:30-8:00 so it is after dinner.
"When you stop learning you stop growing."
Was curious to know how much you charge for your Halloween Carnival/ Fall Festival? Does your admission price include any food? If not, what food do you serve and what do you charge?