Our PTO does one huge fundraiser (which involves the whole school) and the entire profit from that is dedicated to the 8th grade trip, which is very expensive.
One thing I've noticed around my child's school is that whenever anyone starts to mess with a 'tradition', even if it has outlived it's usefullness, unless there is A LOT of explanation on the front end that you are purposefully choosing to move away from that tradition and why, people get very upset. We had a 'fundraiser' that lost money, and people still ask Why don't we do X anymore?
This is not a field trip, this is a class trip. The 8th grade parents do their own fundraising to get to the $500 needed to pay for the trip. They want PTL to share their fundraiser and give them the profit to pay off their class trip fee.
Our HSA gives Pre-K-7th grade $4000 for field trips to be used how the teachers would like and then we give our 8th grade $1000 for their class trip. That is not nearly enough of what they need so the 8th grade does their own fundraising. This year I also have twins in 8th grade and we started on our fundraising this summer with "The Drive for Dodge Event" it was very successful for us. We held a car wash, bake sale and theme basket raffle along with the drive and made $1500 for the day (we only held the event for 4 hours). We are also selling 250 club raffle tickets: we have 250 tickets worth $50 each, people can pay all at once or pay $2 a week for 25 weeks, we have 2 weekly drawings of $25 each beginning in Sept. and for all ticket holders who are paid up by the 10th week we will have 2 early bird drawings of $250 each, then at the end of the 25 weeks we will have our grand prize drawings of 1-$1200, 1-$500, 2-$250, 2-$100, 2-$50, and 2-$25. We give out a little over $4000 and make a little over $8000. Ticket sales have been great and we should reach our goal. This has been an easy fundraiser especially when people hear that there are only 250 tickets.
We provide a subsidy for all grade levels (K-6) for field trips at the same rate (I think it's budgeted for $10/head this coming year). The 6th grade does a huge trip out of state, for which that $10 only puts in a small dent. They also have some other 6th grade related expenses--special t-shirts, for example. They have their own fundraisers to cover that stuff.
Our PTO does all the fundraising at the school, but we allow our 6th grade class one fundraiser per year to raise money for their promotion. This year they are doing Entertainment books. Some years they sell See's candy. We keep their money in our checking account, but they have a separate line item in the budget to keep track of it.
