Going beyond bake sales
From hiring comedians and holding silent auctions, parents get creative -- and raise thousands of dollars for schools
In the softly lit yard of the James M. Curley Elementary School in Jamaica Plain, more than 350 people mingled at a silent auction, bidding on restaurant dinners, facials, and yoga classes. Mayor Thomas M. Menino, city councilors, and top Boston school officials hobnobbed with the guests as a reggae and blues musician hummed and a juggler entertained children.
Forget selling chocolate bars and hawking gift wrap. As another school year kicks off, parents can expect increasingly sophisticated fund-raisers like this evening gathering at the Curley, which needed cash for music teachers and school supplies.
The Curley last fall raised $12,000 from the silent auction, and other schools have raised as much or more to soften the blow of teacher layoffs, supply shortages, and the loss of electives. State and local budgets are starting to recover from the economic downturn of the past three years, but the additional money pays only for the basics.
''For the last two years, we have not had enough money for the extras," said Mirna Vega-Wilson, principal of the Curley. ''But the priority for the parents was to bring music into the life of the school, so they took it upon themselves."
School fund-raising has mushroomed into a multibillion-dollar business. Sales of such products as candy and magazine subscriptions generated $1.9 billion in 2001, up from $1.7 billion in 1997, according to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers, which represents companies that make the products.
Nationally, the average American school raises $17,000, according to the National PTA. So frenzied is the fund-raising scene that the Chicago-based group this year published its first-ever magazine dedicated solely to the topic.
Linda Hodge, president of the National PTA, said the group had to respond to what has become an industry among its six million members.
''Parents are getting tired of fund-raising and being asked to donate money," Hodge said. ''So they're trying to be creative -- walkathons, job-a-thons, parent-child nights out."
Locally, a parent-teacher organization in Norwood brought in a comedian. The Academy Avenue Primary School in Weymouth held a ''girls' night out," charging $30 per person for treats such as manicures, psychic readings, and wine. A booster club in Oxford raffled off a Mercedes, one of many fund-raisers in the small south-central Massachusetts town that raised $192,000 after all extracurricular activities were cut last year.
Parents said they had to get creative or risk losing out to the bake sales, the requests for money from the local sports league, and other run-of-the-mill solicitations.
''You're vying for who's going to get it out first," said Janet Rose, the outgoing president of the parent council at the Lawrence W. Pingree Primary School in Weymouth. The group raised $10,000 for new computers at the school by raffling off goodies -- nail care, music lessons, dinners -- every day for a month.
''We're with eight elementary schools in this town," Rose said. ''The cookie dough form will be out the first week of school. You've got to get [your request] out."
Tim Sullivan, publisher of the Wrentham-based magazine PTO Today, said that silent auctions or gala dinners with politicians are a new trend for elementary schools whose fund-raisers usually are more low-key.
More parent groups strive to hold one or two big fund-raisers a year rather than an event a month.
''The best groups do one, two, or three things tops, and they do them loud and well," Sullivan said. ''The mistake some groups make is they fund-raise 24-7, all year round, and the average parent gets so tired that they tune you out."
The big events also appease parents who do not feel comfortable sending their children door-to-door to sell gift wrap.
But parents and educators say they're worried about how far some groups have had to go to help out financially-strapped school systems.
In Milton, last year, the school system informed parents that as of September, the approximately 75 clubs and activities at the high school and middle school level would no longer exist. Parents and students coordinated fund-raisers, including a golf tournament, a compact disc of Thanksgiving music, and jars to collect money at local businesses.
The parents and students raised nearly $90,000, enough to pay stipends to teachers running the clubs and help out with some of the activity costs for the 2003-04 school year. The groups ranged from the student newspaper to the honor society to the poetry club. For the upcoming school year, parents and the School Department split the cost of the clubs.
Even though the drive succeeded, Milton parent Barbara Plonski had mixed feelings. Plonski teaches science at Milton High, advises the science club, and has two children at the school. She did not think it was right to have families instead of the school system pick up the entire tab for the high school's activities. And it raises issues of inequity since many high schools probably could not raise the money that Milton High did.
But Plonski could not bear the thought of a school that closed shop after the final bell.
''We shouldn't have to do it," she said. ''But I just can't see the kids not having these experiences. My own son joined the poetry club and liked it. How many kids find out what their passions are through these other activities?" 