Best and Worst of PTA events?

[Anonymous]

DP. You know, you can make your point without being a jerk. Does it make you feel good to put down someone who is dedicating their time to help with the PTA?

So this just sounds childish and pretty much makes the point about the self absorbed martyr moms pushing the book fair. Its very hiring to hear about all the time these moms dedicate to the book fair when parents don't want it, its not a good money maker, it disrupts the media center, and just makes money for a company taking advantage of those moms. Couldn't you all just have a TupperWare party with your friends instead and let people focus on actual ways to help the schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

DP. You know, you can make your point without being a jerk. Does it make you feel good to put down someone who is dedicating their time to help with the PTA?

So this just sounds childish and pretty much makes the point about the self absorbed martyr moms pushing the book fair. Its very hiring to hear about all the time these moms dedicate to the book fair when parents don't want it, its not a good money maker, it disrupts the media center, and just makes money for a company taking advantage of those moms. Couldn't you all just have a TupperWare party with your friends instead and let people focus on actual ways to help the schools.

How naive of you. You clearly have some pretty ignorant views of the people who volunteer on the PTA. Guess what majority of the PTA board members at our school have demanding full time jobs and don't have time to have "tupperware parties"because being on the PTA is practically another job in itself, a thankless job I should add. Thats the truth. But go ahead and continue to belittle the PTA from afar instead of actually.. you know, helping. By the way just because YOU and a handful of parents think the book fair is lame, doesn't mean that other parents don't enjoy it. love, PTA President

[Anonymous]

If people want to volunteer to help the school, why do you hate on them? At our school (I'm the former PTS Pres who likes the book fair and the $$ it brings so we can fund other fun/free events), the parent who runs the book fair doesn't put out most of the crap Scholastic sends. Sure, a few erasers, book mark's, etc., but the rest stays in the big containers and gets shipped right back to Scholastic. No need to put it out, just let your book fair parent know. See, we can share info and help each other rather than hating.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Best: 5K race, science night, international night, silent auction, bingo night, harvest carnival, pre-packaged school supplies

Worst: family dance, family movie, breakfast with mom/dad, talent show

Prepackaged school supplies is such a rip off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Former PTA President. Our Scholastic book fairs (we had 2, fall and spring), raised over $30k for the school, at no cost to the school. You make it a social thing (kids come in their PJs from 7:00-8:15, teachers rotate through reading books), and the kids love it! Plus, older kids get to practice math skills when it's not too busy - that's going to cost $12.42, and you gave me $12.50, or $15.00, how much change should ypu get back? Parents also like to buy books frim the wishlist created by their child's teacher for their classroom.

Not sure why all the hate over books that encourage kids to read! Again, no one forces you buy the books. You think it's too expensive, skip it!

Ugh..spoken like a true book fair groupie mom. The school always has a handle of moms that love this stuff while everyone else hates it. My favorite is the comment at "no cost". You spent 60+ hours of volunteer time making money for scholastic and feeling important about your big book fair job. You blocked out the media center for a week.

You claim it inspires reading BUT the merchandise from Scholastic has been significantly shifting to toys, pens and other crap. The books are not good quality but the fun yet crappy ones like Diary of Wimpy kid etc. They'll throw in one or two good titles but overall its pretty mediocre to bad. Book fairs are not about literacy anymore than Boosterthon is about health. Its just not. The teachers don't love taking time out of class to take the kids to book fair. Do the kids love buying a cute eraser and pencil sharpener. Of course, they do! They would also love an arcade to unlimited ice cream.

From a $$ perspective, many, many parents are only purchasing things from your fair because the kids are begging, don't want to be left out or they don't know that 75% goes back to Scholastic. For the quality of books sold at Scholastic, many would much prefer to just get those at the library.

Our school did a donation drive for used kids books and then sold them for $1 at the school carnival. This made a lot of money that 100% went back to the school. Since all books were $1, the poorer kids weren't stuck buying the 1-2 titles prices at $2 that Scholastic begrudgingly provides. They don't see their richer friends walking away with the expensive hard cover books.

+100!

HATE the Scholastic book fairs. Agree that it's crappy that the kids don't get media for two weeks a year since the book fair takes over, and the kids can only go if they want to shop. Agree completely that SO many of the books are just CRAP. Enough with the Shopkins 'books' that are really not even books. I'm not a literary snob by any means, but I feel like 60% of the Scholastic options are junk.

Just an aside here...but I used to teach at a school in another state where we did Scholastic Book Fair and we requested that they leave ALL the NON-BOOKs in the truck! We had NOTHING BUT BOOKS at our fair and it helped cut down on complaints a tremendous amount! It really sucks for teachers when parents send in $20 with their kid for the book fair, and the kid buys 2 posters, a pen, a cool eraser, and a wacky notepad...and no books!!! And then the teacher gets an angry note from parents about "why did my kid bring home all this crap?!" We didn't feel like we could restrict the child's spending unless it was directed by the parent to only buy BOOKS with the money...so we finally got smart about it and at least eliminated everything that wasn't BOOKS! As for the quality...yep...a lot of captain underpants and Lego Friends series...but sometimes that is what "hooks" a kid into reading.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Cutting a big check at the beginning of the year does not work for FARMS (and cheap!) families.

Neither does the Silent/Not-so-silent auction or Booster-thon or Scholastic Book fair. No matter what you do you have an issue and you're not going to raise much if you have poorer families. You have to target to your community.

False. My school had both a silent auction and boosterthon, and it appealed to completely different crowds. We earned more than $20K from Boosterthon after we had already done an amazing silent auction that raised $22K! And our school is 28% Farms! Do you know who was giving $20 flat donations or 50 cents a lap for their kid?! The FARMS families!!! Everyone wants to be part of raising money for the school and part of supporting and sponsoring their child in doing something fun! You guys can knock it all you want, but Boosterthon blew us away with what they provided to our school. The morale is high and the classroom "team spirit" during that two weeks and beyond was off the charts! And that is priceless!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

DP. You know, you can make your point without being a jerk. Does it make you feel good to put down someone who is dedicating their time to help with the PTA?

So this just sounds childish and pretty much makes the point about the self absorbed martyr moms pushing the book fair. Its very hiring to hear about all the time these moms dedicate to the book fair when parents don't want it, its not a good money maker, it disrupts the media center, and just makes money for a company taking advantage of those moms. Couldn't you all just have a TupperWare party with your friends instead and let people focus on actual ways to help the schools.

Wow...not OP, but you suck!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If people want to volunteer to help the school, why do you hate on them? At our school (I'm the former PTS Pres who likes the book fair and the $$ it brings so we can fund other fun/free events), the parent who runs the book fair doesn't put out most of the crap Scholastic sends. Sure, a few erasers, book mark's, etc., but the rest stays in the big containers and gets shipped right back to Scholastic. No need to put it out, just let your book fair parent know. See, we can share info and help each other rather than hating.

We do the same. We don't put most of the small items that scholastic sends and just put some stuff out. Our students buy books and our parents fulfill the teacher booklists. We also randomly hand out free books to students when they buy books and say goofy things like "you are are 20th customer" etc and give them a standing ovation. It is so much fun. We also run it in the evening hours and either show a movie or have some other events planned at the media center. Parents like the evening hours and will buy a ton of books. I agree that the books are inexpensive but the pens and other tchotchkes are really overpriced!
Another thing we are thinking of doing is doing one shelf of Spanish language books...maybe next year.

[Anonymous]

I'd be interested to know what percentage of profit other fundraising companies take if you use them as compared to Boosterthon. I know some schools have mentioned that they do magazine sales or some other types of fundraiser like that, but what is the take from that? Less than 50%? I doubt it. I know we have these restaurant fundraising nights where you get the whole school to go to a certain restaurant on the same night and they give back a percentage of the profit to the school, but the best margin I've seen is like 25%.
Our PTA was very upfront about Boosterthon taking 40-50% depending on which option we chose. (You can do an option where they staff doesn't stay on campus all week, so you have volunteers delivering prizes and tracking pledges and fielding all the questions and all that. Or you can do a version where they run everything from start to finish, so your percentage is determined by that.) There was no "don't tell the parents" message at all. But maybe the PP was talking about how they recommend that you publicize and emphasize the amount of PROFIT the raised rather than the total amount? But that only makes sense because if you are trying to buy all new $15K equipment for a computer lab, you don't want to announce halfway through that "hey we raised $28K!" if you know that 45% of that is going to Boosterthon. Instead, you say "we've raised $12K so far!" when you have raised 45% more than that because that is the amount that the SCHOOL is keeping.
As a PTA, we definitely thought they did 45% of the work, provided a valuable service, an extremely efficient website/collections/social media-connected system, and an incredibly profitable fundraiser. I fail to see how a for-profit company planning, executing, and delivering a ridiculously-profitable fundraiser is unethical. But maybe I am blind to it because we now get a whole new media center out of it????

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The book fair always seemed like a ripoff. I imagine if the school charges $8/book they might get 10% of that. I'd rather give $8 to the PTA and not buy overpriced books from Scholastic.

In our school, Scholastic gives us 25% of the sales. How come you find scholastic to be expensive? Most books are less than $10. We carry a whole boatload of books that are for 1-5 dollars. There is however a threshold of sales we have to meet. We are a school of poor students and they LOVE the bookfair.

I am sure your PTA would love to get $8 from you and not care if you do not buy the books. As long as you can give the money the PTA is fine. In most of the affluent schools all parents write a check for $100-150 for the PTA and then they do not have to buy anything else. If you can give the money directly to the PTA, the volunteers will be more than happy because they won't have to do any work for fundraisers.

You should always give money to the PTA. They appreciate it a lot.

Although I live in, god forbid, the DCC, we typically write the PTA a check for a couple hundred and call it a day.

[Anonymous]

We earned more than $20K from Boosterthon after we had already done an amazing silent auction that raised $22K! And our school is 28% Farms! Do you know who was giving $20 flat donations or 50 cents a lap for their kid?! The FARMS families!!! Everyone wants to be part of raising money for the school and part of supporting and sponsoring their child in doing something fun! You guys can knock it all you want, but Boosterthon blew us away with what they provided to our school. The morale is high and the classroom "team spirit" during that two weeks and beyond was off the charts! And that is priceless!

Wow, I don't think I've read something so tone deaf and self absorbed in a long time. Do you realize that families on FARMS are food insecure, have difficulty getting together rent each month, struggle to buy their kids new shoes or winter coats and spending $20 on Boosterthon doesn't mean just giving up 4 Starbucks drinks? Do you understand the humiliation of poverty that poor kids and their families experience around people like you?

Of course the poor kids don't want to be excluded! Everyday when these kids walk into school they see how your kids have so much more. They see your kids in a house with their own bedroom while they are in a tiny apartment sharing a room with multiple siblings or even their parents. They see your kids new shoes, soccer ball and new school supplies. The parents giving you your $20 that would have paid for food for the next week aren't doing it because they love the priceless experience that you brought to the school -they are doing it so that at least for this their kid isn't on the sideline. They are doing it because they want to avoid the humiliation that you'll think they don't do their part. For once, they don't want their kids to feel less than the others. Boosterthon knows this and plays off this feeling. Its just morally wrong on so many levels.

[Anonymous]

Instead, you say "we've raised $12K so far!" when you have raised 45% more than that because that is the amount that the SCHOOL is keeping.
As a PTA, we definitely thought they did 45% of the work, provided a valuable service, an extremely efficient website/collections/social media-connected system, and an incredibly profitable fundraiser. I fail to see how a for-profit company planning, executing, and delivering a ridiculously-profitable fundraiser is unethical. But maybe I am blind to it because we now get a whole new media center out of it????

LOL - yes this is unethical Molly Morals. If you want to be ethical you would say we have raised $10,000 $6,500 for our school and $4,500 for Boosterthon. Its also unethical to prey on kids desire to be included to raise boats of money. If you want to be ethical, everyone would be free to participate with or without raising money and donations would be anonymous.

Boosterthon is not illegal but it is unethical.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I assume you're a new PTA board member looking for feedback.

In addition to the events of the sort cited above, PLEASE act as a strident voice on behalf of the issues impacting the school. Organize petitions, email campaigns, anything to make noise about it to the principal, BoE, MCPS Central ... whoever is in charge of making decisions on that issue.

The PTA needs to be more than bake sales. It needs to be the voice of parents and students.

Agree. Your concerns and questions need to go beyond a principal level, esp if you have a weak principal protecting him/herself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The book fair always seemed like a ripoff. I imagine if the school charges $8/book they might get 10% of that. I'd rather give $8 to the PTA and not buy overpriced books from Scholastic.

Just curious, in my experience Scholastic books are cheaper than B&n for example. Why do you call them overpriced?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The book fair always seemed like a ripoff. I imagine if the school charges $8/book they might get 10% of that. I'd rather give $8 to the PTA and not buy overpriced books from Scholastic.

Just curious, in my experience Scholastic books are cheaper than B&n for example. Why do you call them overpriced?

Because the ones that I compared to Amazon ran about 20% higher, but it's not like I did an exhaustive comparison.