I’d love to. I don’t mind paying the extra $20 or so to adequately fund education. Unfortunately, I’m competing against empty-nesters who don’t want to pay more taxes to fund other people’s kids’ education; people who couldn’t afford to pay more taxes even if they wanted to; people who rent to college kids and military who don’t want to pay taxes to fund other people’s kids’ education; “taxpayers’ rights” organizations that are against taxes no matter who or what they’re for; you name it.
Robin
You may someday own a home whose property values are driven by the quality of the public schools in the neighborhood. So you never know; you might have some skin in this game after all.
Let’s try to get constructive:
If your school district is completely underfunded: Bite the bullet and do the right thing; work for bond issues and higher taxes.
If you district is adequately funded, but spending money on football stadiums and administrative overhead: your schoolboard is run by idiots. Go to meetings. Vote the rascals out. Run for schoolboard yourself.
If the allocation of funds is as good as it gets, and you’re stuck raising money at the local school level, but you don’t like the way it’s being handled: these decisions are being made by volunteers, people like you. Go to your school and sign up to be on the committee that’s in charge of raising money. If you have a better idea for fundraising, speak up.
I did admit that it would sound callous.
Most of that attitude comes from being bombarded at work by parents who are pushing crap to fundraise for their kids school or other activity. I’ve really just gotten to where I don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.
My neice just started private school (the tuition is higher than what I paid for an ivy league law school) and apparently this is just the cover charge, they already have a schedule of fundraiser that I (as local a family member) am expected to attend (I don’t mind attending). I went to one pre-first-day-of-school fundraiser for the new students and I found out that these guys have a foundation that is large enough to pay for just about everything they are trying to raise money for this year.
Hear! Hear! If you don’t like the fundraiser that your child’s school is doing, then show up at the 1st PTA meeting in the fall and lobby for something more acceptable. Fundraisers are a pain in everybody’s behind, but they’re effective and they raise money that is spent directly on the students in your school. Not the school across town–right there in your child’s classroom.
I’ll agree–I hate the crap prizes & I hate the hassle…but I love the visiting authors and the traveling exhibits and the field trips to cool places, where they get to do neat hands-on things, etc. I went to parochial schools where pennies were pinched until they were transparent–I had never seen a real live author up close & personal until my daughter went to kindergarten. She’s seen & met at least one every year–she thinks that’s normal. A nationally acclaimed author comes to my child’s school every year to do a writing workshop with the kids–all of this paid for by those PTA fundraisers.
And maybe there are schools that waste money right & left, but that’s not the case in any school I’ve been in. Most of the teachers & administrators that I’ve known have been dedicated to doing their job well. It’s just expensive to run a school. So when their budgets get cut, they cut the extras. Fundraisers are just a way to put that back.
I think I misunderstood you, Antinor01, I thought you were talking about funding schools in general, not fundraising. The causes and methods of most fundraising for schools is contemptable, sure. Saying that you don’t think school funding affects you is spurious.
This is why you put half your stash in the FREEZER. So, come July when you’re jonesing for a Thin Mint, you can have a fix!!! (Yes, I have about a dozen boxes in my freezer… heh heh heh…)
Whoever said “good product sells” - VERY true.
My kids get sent home with giftcrap brochures every fall. I throw those out the minute they arrive. I’d rather donate cash than sell that junk. Last spring though, they had an additional fundraiser: Otis Spunkmyer frozen cookie dough. Those cookies are good. I didn’t let the kids sell them around the neighborhood (too much hassle as it has to be kept frozen) but I did buy some tubs for our household (in the spare freezer, right next to the chocolate-covered-crack-flavored GS cookies).
Then there are school photos. Our school does them twice a year. In the fall, you have to prepay, and fight to get your money back if you don’t like them. One year, my daughter’s photo was horrid, and the teacher forgot to send her for a retake on retake day, and to get my money back, I had to mail them to “the address on the envelope”. Only, the envelope had no address. And I never got around to tracking them down. The spring photos, they send home for approval. Well, probably half of them get misplaced and the parents have to pay for everything. Plus they have really cool photo bookmarks, backpack tags and the like so the kids really whine for the contents. Scammers. Again, I’d rather make a donation.
I refuse to go door to door except for the GS cookies, and last year my son had to try to hawk Christmas wreaths for the Boy Scout troop. So there was unchurched Dweezil Jewishlastname hawking wreaths for a Christian holiday in a neighborhood that has a 20% Indian population… and nearly everyone bought.
Forgot my one grumble with Girl Scout fundraising: Last year - just a month after the major fundraiser (cookie drive), the local service unit handed out magazine sales brochures. My troop’s leader tried to refuse to take them, as we were damshure not going to do that fundraiser. They forced her to take them.
She brought them to the troop meeting, announced we were NOT going to sell magazines, and gave them to the kids to take home and throw out.
Well, to be honest I really don’t pay attention to school funding issues. Mostly for the reasons I mentioned above, it just hasn’t really impacted my life. Though I guess looking at home buying, I should pay attention to it, really annoying that.
But yes, it’s primarily the fundraising that gets on my every last nerve. That’s why I’ve decided to just not buy/donate anything at work this year. I figure it’ll keep me from screaming at someone “I don’t give a flying fuck if your daughter wants to go to cheerleading camp and needs money for it! Pay for it your goddamn self if it’s that fucking important!!”
Also, I wish the Girl Scouts would come to my door. The parents at my work sell magazine subscriptions and hoagies, neither of which I want, especially at such inflated prices. They’d have a guaranteed sale of two boxes of Thin Mints and a box of Tagalogs if they came knocking.
(Yes, I know you can buy them online. But I would rather buy from some local troop, but short of stalking an elementary school and saying “give me some damn cookies, kid!” I don’t know what to do. So I guess I am not complaining so much about fundraisers as about the quality of the fundraisers. Seriously, have you had marching-band quality hoagies? Yuck.)
I think the problem is that if you tell someone, “Vote for the budget, and we won’t have to buy crap this year,” they’ll just say, “Oh we’ll still have to buy the crap whether the budget passes or not. The crap ain’t going’ anywhere.”
Actually, the problem is that they’ll be right*. There’s always going to be some gaddamn grammar rodeo somewhere that someone wants to send students to. Now if they said, “Vote for the budget and no crap this year,” it would pass in a landslide.
I think we’re getting to the heart of the matter. Methinks your issue is not so much with school funding, but with obnoxious co-workers.
“Hey…who ordered the Filipinos?”
“I’ve been thinking of digging up the Japanese Garden.”
What you said. Now, if someone said"we’re raising money for library books", I’d be writing a check out to the school librarian. But in my neck of the woods, it’s usually for some athletic/dance pursuit. And never to raise funds to subsidize fees for needy kids who want to play hockey or take dance-it’s to reduce costs for families who have incomes of $75K. So if you want me to buy shit so Ashleigyh-Ambyr’s menstral-clot dance troup can go to the Moose Jaw Chautauqua, sell me some good shit!
The problem at my school was always the “preferred” clubs and activities getting all of the funds. Our music department only got a certain amount of school funds. It always went to the choir. They traveled the country, had high-tech pyrotechnics at their spring shows while the marching band had to fundraise like hell to go to one competition an hour away from home. That was the only competition we did all year except for our town’s band review.
There were so many campus clubs and they only allowed so many fundraisers per year that the bigger or more popular groups got to raise money while the rest of us were SOL.
When I was in elementry school a decade ago (ek, that makes me feel old) I went to a Catholic school in a blue collar town. The tution was 2200 dollars a year. I think the Chruch kicked in another 1000 per student, give or take. We had art, music, gym, Spanish and a nurse. The fundraisers we had were grass roots. Bake sales, Santa’s Pancake Breakfast, craft fairs, turkey bingo. All of the profit went to the school. The Church ran bingo and parents were required to either help or pay sort of nominal fee. My father ran the bank for it four times a year. It wasn’t exactly crushing. My parents, along with another couple, ran an auction for the school and it made 38,000 dollars, which was a lot of money for the community at the time.
All of these fundraisers seemed to bulster community spirit, rather than make people mad. Granted, people felt much more responsible for the school as it was in their parish (we aren’t catholic). When much of the building’s interior needed to be painted, the PTA decided to spend a weekend doing it. There were enough tradespeople to help with the cafeteria and assembly hall.
The only thing we ever sold from a company was candybars and that was only every other year.
I understand that not all public school communities are this active, but I would say that 90 % of the work was done by 5 to 10 % of the parents. And they are given a lot more funding than our school ever was (the public schools in the area were getting ~6K a year per student)
The bake sales and bingo are different, it’s obvious the majority of the money is going to the school or cause advertised.
But when the kid hands you a big glossy catalog of crap, it’s obvious the school isn’t going to get much profit from these sales, and you’re all making some fundraiser company rich.
Here’s the way I see it.
May as well save the money.
Because, no doubt, you’ve seen firsthand that classes with 20 kids per teacher don’t learn any faster than classes with 40 kids per teacher. Hell, half of them would finish below average, just kick them into the street and let them do real work; we could save a shitload of money. It’s not like money could be used to repair light fixtures or purchase classroom maps that didn’t still have the Soviet Union on them. And pull all the janitorial staff, since the kids would mess thing up anyways.
You have no fucking clue.