Hi,
Our school district has a central copying office that we send out virtually all our copying for no cost to us. The office has a turn around time of a few days to 2 weeks depending on the time of year.

If we need something in a hurry, we copy it ourselves at our school (providing our own paper) or pay for it at kinko's or some such place. We encourage all our committee chairpeople to plan ahead.
Carrie

At our school, the PTA does get a code for the copier and is then billed at the end of the year. It is not a really high bill because they don't charge you like a copier would. this works great and I would strongly recommend it to anyone.

We buy our own paper through the school district, which allows us to get it at a very good price. We also pay for the purchase of a toner cartridge each year. In return for this, we are allowed to make pretty much all the copies we want. We have an agreement with the school to generally use the copier during the lunch periods, but PTA and the teachers are very flexible. It helps that there is a second (older & slower) copier in the teacher's lounge -- biweekly newsletter printings can take two hours.

One advantage of A v. O -- Office Depot is a national sponsor of PTA. Our local Office Depot is willing to run the newsletter for us for only the cost of the paper. As it happens, this doesn't work for us (they want two evenings to do it in, and the paper is cheaper through the district), but you might check to see if it would work for you. Things like event flyers usually don't have as tight a printing schedule as the newsletter.

We give our school $500 per year for the use of the copier and any paper we need. If we have a particularly special paper need, the PTO will buy it, but usually, we are fortunate to be able to share the school's supply. Sounds like we are very lucky.

Well aren't y'all lucky at our school we pay for all of our copies, newsletter and all. I blieve last year they spent approx. $4000 plus on printing. This year I have run all over town and surrounding towns to try and find someone that would give us break. So far we found someone to do the newletter cheaper and to cut cost I print alot of stuff at home.

Our PTO purchases a ton of paper to donate to the school. In turn, we are allowed to make as many copies as we need, as long as we're not interfering with teachers getting their stuff done.