October 8, 2013 5:26PM ET
No one really wants to buy candy or wrapping paper for a school fundraiser, but some parents can’t afford it.
- Topics:
- Ohio
- Cincinnati
- Education
In April 2010, the students at Concord Elementary School in Anderson, S.C., sold lemonade on the playground to raise money for new landscaping for the school.Ken Ruinard/AP
Sean McCauley, an elementary school principal in Cincinnati, Ohio, has been at his job for six years – and doesn’t remember ever asking his students to participate in a fundraiser, the kind in which children and parents are asked to buy and sell overpriced soaps, calendars and magazine subscriptions to family members, friends and coworkers.
It’s not that McCauley wouldn’t like to raise money for Ethel M. Taylor Academy, where he oversees about 300 students in a school in the middle of a Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority Project.
Ninety percent of the students’ parents and guardians earn income under the poverty level. Every child receives a government-paid breakfast and lunch, and 15 to 20 percent of the student body is considered homeless, either living in a shelter or camped out at somebody else’s home.
“We’ve been approached by fundraising organizations, but we always tell them that our families aren’t going to be able to do that,” said McCauley.
In times past, that meant McCauley’s school couldn’t take advantage of the aid many schools get from their fundraising. The nonprofit Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers website indicates that schools raise nearly $ 1.4 billion annually, which pays for everything from athletic team and band uniforms to playground equipment and computer labs.
But increasingly, thanks to technology and some creative thinking, schools with fewer resources are able to join the pack. Even schools that are relatively flush are changing the way they raise funds.
“School fundraising, especially public school fundraising, is in the midst of a sea change,” said Michael Montgomery, a fundraising consultant and an adjunct professor at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan.
Some schools hit you up to the degree that the parents get kind of a glaze over their faces, and they don’t hear you anymore.
During the 1950s and ’60s, school fundraising became somewhat mainstream, utilizing annual carnivals, car washes and dances – not to mention ubiquitous vending machines – to raise money for schools. By the late 1970s, as school budgets continued to weaken, it was commonplace to award students with prizes for selling candy, linens, posters and whatever the companies could come up with. (In 1997, the industry began to discourage door-to-door sales after an unsupervised 11-year-old boy in New Jersey was lured into a house and killed).
Today, schools around the country ask children multiple times each year to sell everything from flowers and candles to Tupperware and T-shirts.
“Some schools hit you up to the degree that the parents get kind of a glaze over their faces and they don’t hear you anymore,” said Sarah Barrett, a school fundraising consultant based out of Studio City, Calif., and the author of “A Mom’s Guide to School Fundraising.”
To cut through the glaze, students and schools have had to innovate. A couple of years ago an Illinois school had students selling fertilizer from an alpaca farm, and in recent years poker tournaments have been popular. Then last month, the boosters of an elementary school in Lucama, N.C., held an auction for a rifle.
Critics immediately brought up last year’s mass shooting at the school in Newtown, Conn., but the controversial auction did raise $ 7,000.
Online fundraising has helped level the playing field for lower-income schools, says Jeremy Burton, chief technology officer for Razoo.com, an online giving and fundraising site. PTA groups for poorer schools may not be able to get money from Mom and Dad, but getting an uncle or aunt to donate can be easier, or even complete strangers, if a school’s message resonates with the public. “You can expand your reach,” Burton said.
To date, 157 PTAs have raised approximately $ 614,000 on the site, Burton said.
But in general, schools like Ethel M. Taylor Academy – which doesn’t have a PTA – don’t receive the benefits that school fundraising brings. The downside is obvious, Montgomery said: “Private fundraising for public schools has the potential for enlarging – rather than remedying –the disparities in American public education.”
A year ago, McCauley asked his school’s resource coordinator, Molly Luken, to set up a fundraising vehicle, the Soaring Hawks Foundation.
But some scrappy schools aren’t waving the white flag; instead, they’re eschewing traditional sales and trying other approaches.
“A lot of schools, across the spectrum, have done more reaching out to corporations, trying to get them to donate supplies or money. And some communities have created educational foundations that raise money for all of the schools in the districts,” Barrett said back in San Francisco.
However, some communities don’t want to share money. Several months ago, in California, the Santa Monica-Malibu school board indicated that it wanted to take some of the funds raised by Malibu High School and disperse them to some less-affluent schools in the district. They were met with dissension from the Malibu High parents.
Which is why it may be better for a low-income school to simply go it alone. A year ago, McCauley asked his school’s resource coordinator, Molly Luken, to set up a fundraising vehicle, the Soaring Hawks Foundation.
In the last year, the foundation has raised $ 15,000, some of which was spent last summer. The school’s foundation, also using a matching grant from a local bank, bought more than 100 children bicycles and bike helmets as a reward for passing a state achievement test. Before it was created, if the Ethel M. Taylor Academy raised money, McCauley had to first get a number of signatures approving the funds – a process that could take weeks. With the foundation, which has a board of directors, spending money on students can occur, if needed, in the same day.
If the foundation hits its stride, McCauley has big plans for it. Among his wish list – to hire a school librarian.
“We haven’t had a librarian for two years,” he said. “Because of state cuts, which trickled into our district, we had to let her go. A librarian would be a great resource for the kids,” McCauley says. He also someday wants a marquee sign outside the school, to post messages alerting the community about what’s going on in classes.
But that, like the annual salary of a school librarian, is a big-ticket item. Marquee signs, which need to be secured into the ground, can cost about $ 30,000, McCauley says. A sign would help link the school to the rest of the community – it never helps a fundraising program if the students are invisible.
“Some people drive by, and I’m not sure they even know this is a school,” McCauley said.
