I'm a HUGE advocate of using high school students as volunteers!
Over the past 2 years, we have created a wonderful relationship with the Key Club... in addition, to babysitting at our general meetings, they also help at every family night we have (we have one a month)! At this point, our students know the high school students by nameand look forward to seeing them!
For our carnival, we also have had the help of the varsity boy's basketball team (they ran the hoop shoot), the cheerleaders (they donated a mini-cheer camp as an auction prize), the Multicultural Club, and the Science Club (they created a room of "experiments' for the kids to do!).
Our experience with high school students has been exceptional!!!
Kelley
We used high school volunteers at our fall festival and they were great!
If I'm not mistaken in order to graduate, high school students must complete 75 hours of "community service" (volunteer hours). And then there are the clubs such as mentioned above that also require additional hours.
We went to the teachers (sponsors) of the clubs and asked if they would like to help, and boy did they. At first some of our parents weren't so keen on the idea, thinking that the students would need "baby sitting" and not be much of a help, but boy were they suprised! We plan on using them at our other events as well.
Re: volunteer hours from high school students. Our student volunteers came from a Catholic high school who requires all their students to complete 100 hours of volunteer service in their 4 years there. BUT, two public high schools have clubs that require service hours (like Key Club or Honor Society). Call your local high school and see if they have any service clubs whose members need volunteer hours. The public high schools even sent student volunteers during the school day to help with Field Day! It's a great help.
SHC
SHC, I'm curious, you mentioned "volunteer hours" in your high school. This is an interesting concept. I have a daughter in our high school and I asked her if we had something like this and she said no. What is that exactly? Does the PTO sponsor it? I mean, does the PTO offer "volunteer hours" for high schoolers and when they hit a certain amount of hours, do they receive a free movie pass or something like that?
And, another note about ideas for carnivals, etc (I apologize if this is an 'old' idea!)... We're planning our spring carnival and we are going to have a basket auction setup in the gym where our prize redeemtion booth will be. We came up with about 15 different types of baskets and recruited a teacher to serve as "the collector" of the items.
We will send notes home to parents (K-6) asking for items for the baskets based on the themes. The themes of our baskets include fishing basket, coffee lovers basket, baking basket, crafters basket, rainy day activities basket, summertime fun basket, etc. Our school did this once before and there was so much stuff collected we had to use large storage totes as the baskets and we raised a LOT of money doing this!
A neighboring school does this same thing but they give each classroom a basket theme and the students in the classroom are to bring in an item to put in their basket for the auction.
The baskets are set on a table with a sheet of paper in front of it taped to the table and people just write their bid... they can come back a little bit later to see if they've been outbid! At the close of the carnival, the highest bidder gets the basket!
Oh yeah, be sure your bidding sheet lists a phone number for the bidder, as some people won't stay until the end of the event. [img]smile.gif[/img]
Happy Mom
I am waaaayy down south in Louisiana. Wish I could help you. We just lucked into finding this guy--he was the head of the fitness department at a college here in town.
For "Tryin Hard": the food was all free so they did not complain. I think they were thrilled we offered something for free. We did get RSVP's via "tickets" but the tickets were free so people did not really feel an obligation to come, even if they had rsvp'd. For dessert, we got cookies and brownies from Sam's. The brownies, by the way, were delicious--tasted homemade.
Tryinhard,
We include a pre-order form on the bottom of the 1st flyer we send home about a family night. The pre-orders always give us an idea of how many pizzas to order (we order 2 x the # of pre-orders!) Little Caesars' charges us $5 per pizza. We have them cut it in 6 slices and sell each slice for $1. We offer soda by the can for 50cents or 2-liter bottles for $1.50 (we provide cups and ice.) We also have a seperate line for pre-ordered pizza... people love that they don't have to wait in line!
Our philosophy is to have our family nights (we have one each month) break even. These nights are not meant to be fundraisers for us... they are meant to bring the Madison community together. Since you have limited funds, you may want to charge a bit more at first, though.
Good luck with whatever you do...
Kelley
Madison PTO
Mount Vernon, WA
