Damn. My first kid made it all of 3 weeks into kindergarten before they sent home a fundraising product catalog of crap that he can sell to family and friends to raise money for the PTO.
So what is the typical “take” a school gets for these sales?
If it’s something like 20% I much rather write the school a $20 check and be done with it rather than buying or selling $100 worth of cookie tins.
Will the school be just as happy with my cash donation instead of selling a bunch of stuff?
My sister’s middle-schooler is selling magazine subscriptions through a website. According to the home page, the school gets 40% of the purchase price. I thought that was pretty good.
A cash donation would be nice, but the kids usually earn little prizes based on their fundraising sales. It’s not much, and eventually they’re going to have to learn that you usually don’t get prizes for charity work, but hey, they’re just kids.
When my daughter started kindergarten last year, we joined the PTA, and with several other parents suggested implementing a “just give $20” donation campaign alongside the “sell-crap” campaign that had been going on.
Just saw last year’s numbers a few days ago. The just give campaign ended up having double the revenue (for the school) as the sales. But one method didn’t really seem to cannibalize from the other so we’re keeping them both - anecdotal evidence is that the “just give” tended to raise funds directly from parents/relatives, while the sales hit up neighbors/parents’ coworkers.
These kinds of things make me angry. Public schools are government facilities, and the teachers are all government officials.
I can’t remember the last time that I walked into the DMV office and was asked to participate in a “fundraiser” and sell cupcakes so that the DMV could afford to process driver’s licenses better, or asked to sell wrapping paper to help pay the paychecks for soldiers in Iraq or “Please help us raise more money so that Johnny Marine can get the ammo he needs to fight terrorism!”
Seems to me, hey, the school is a government office and I pay taxes. Nuff said.
I wish all schools would go the just-give-$20 route. I’m a teacher, so I’m one of the first people students hit up to buy candy bars or donuts or a discount card (for stuff I don’t buy anyway) for the band trip or football uniforms or whatever. (And if you want to know why schools do this when the DMV doesn’t, it’s because the DMV gets more fully funded–and they don’t HAVE a DMV Marching Band that is raising money to go to nationals.)
What I hate about this fundraising stuff is that a) It puts dreams of sugarplums in kids’ heads, and few kids actually get enough sales to get a nifty prize. b) It puts relatives, neighbors, etc. in an uncomfortable position–there’s pressure to buy, which is how the fund-raising companies make their profit: who can resist the big, hopeful eyes of kid? c) There’s an unfair advantage for kids who have lots of relatives to hit up.
We got one of those ‘coupon books’ to buy so you can save money on things you pay for. I sent it back. No, I’m not giving you $30 or $40 or whatever it is you wanted. Our PTO asks for money about every four to six weeks. My son goes to a private school, though. The public school I was in a few years ago never had kids bring home things to sell because admin didn’t want to ask parents for money. It was all low income. Only the sports and music people ever sold anything (and always hit up the teachers for uniforms and shit).
Hell, we didn’t even ask kids to bring pens and notebooks. That was the job of the teacher and/or department head.
The worst of it is the situation described in the OP, where a kindergartener is given one of those fundraising catalogs to take home. That’s obviously way too young for the kid to do the selling himself or herself, so it’s basically putting the burden on the parents. At least when older kids are asked to do this, there’s at least the possibility that they could do it themselves.