It seems that I'm in the same position here in western MA. I am the co-president of a PTO that has been extremely inactive. Two of us managed to get it going last year....and we held several events including a spaghetti supper, 3 dances, a movie afternoon and a family math night. However, we ended the year with about $400! Fundraisers have not been attempted schoolwide to my knowledge.
We are an urban community, 72% Hispanic, a Title I school, more than 70% are on free/reduced lunch. We are having a welcome to school bbq and picnic for 6th graders and their families (about 130 students) on 9/5. It will be totally free thanks to the generosity of the new school principal!
Just talking with others in similiar situations will be so helpful!
We do Innisbrook, which we netted about $4K last year, we sell Entertainment books, we do the Holiday Gift Shoppe, we have a Carnation Valentine Sale, a Spring See's candy sale. We do Box Tops. We have a big Mexican dinner on the night of Open House. We try to provide free events and nominal charge ones including a Halloween Dance, a December Multi-Cultural Event, a Math Night, a Literacy Night, this year we will be doing an Ice Cream Social on Back to School Night. We get very good attendance - excellent actually. However, we are always looking for ways to increase our coffers. We are lacking funding due to budget shortfalls for alot of items - our front office budget(covers all school supplies), which includes janitorial for a K-6 of 450 kids got slashed to $8000.00 for the whole year!!!!!! We know teachers are going to looking to us for money for basic supplies. I am looking for ideas of how to increase our productivity/Thanks for any ideas.
We are in the same boat. I belong to a group called ELAC English Learners Advisor Committee. When we have our meetings the hispanic families sit together and we have our interpertor sit with them too. This way they can ask any questions and not be too intimidated. Haven't figuered out the fundraising thing yet. I'm new to this too. But email me dirrectly and when we have our first meeting next week hopefully we have some hispanic families I can ask this exact question. What fundraisers would they like to see?
Krista :eek:
We do all our meetings in English and Spanish, but I think some people are a bit intimidated by their limited English. We get decent to good attendance at meetings, but I would like to see more parents involved. Any ideas?
Also, it is difficult to do too much fundraising as our school is high % Economically Disadvantage and we don't have alot of built in financial support- Any ideas as to how we can increase revenue??
