Let’s just check - shall we:
“Ziti with your Sweetie is designed to provide an opportunity for Harry Lee Cole School and Spofford Pond School students to spend a special evening with a parent or important adult figure. One adult figure is welcome per child including, step-parent, partner, grandparent, aunt, uncle, foster parent…”
So - again, clearly organized in a way that a few students were more “special” than many others!
We wanted nothing to do with the PTA/PTO, their fundraising events, or any of their other initiatives during our son’s elementary and middle school years. Please, just raise my taxes and spread the money equally among ALL schools and spare me this ridiculous organization.
Whelp! Maybe so. But this is not (according to the article at least) a matter of who had more money. This had to do with the number of tix available and someone got locked out because they didn’t call soon enough. Oh well. Next year they’ll get a bigger venue or the person will figure out how to get on the horn sooner. Now I REALLY want to know what’s so great about this and how much the tix were.
Would have been my preference too - but (at least in my state) there was an annual cap, no matter how much parents were willing to spend in taxes, not to speak of a large percentage of the voting population no longer having kids…
So the PTO/PTA was a way to do some major fundraising (including from local corporations) that allowed the donation of smartboards and other technology, even A/C systems, that could not be budgeted. And, of course, to have a budget that allowed to make sure that any events were accessible to ALL.
$40 a person, and it sold out in TWENTY FIVE minutes.
So - those who didn’t pay for early access had little chances, those where both parents worked for a living had little chances - and if there HAD been enough tickets, those who couldn’t justify $40 couldn’t have gone anyway.
Clearly a highly sought-after event - so even more maddening how many would only hear from well-off classmates the next school day, how much they missed.
I live in AZ, a bastion of retirement and “I got mine” mentality. No one wants to pay for schools. As a result, we rank 48th in per capita spending per student. So, how much the PTO could raise determined the quality of the school with a school less than two miles away from our son’s so underfunded that churches were donating supplies to that school. In Scottsdale. The PTO at our school should have been fundraising for those schools in addition to its own. But don’t get me started. We bailed when our son reached high school.
BUT the premise of the article is that people who ALREADY contributed a hundred bucks to the organization got a PERK for their dollars (name me an organization who doesn’t do that?) drowned everyone else out. And that was not the case. Only 26 tix of 300 went to people who PAID already for extra access. And this was a pretty homogenous school district.
Where did you go?
And the function of the PTO is to raise funds for its school–it’s not a community project.
Our PTO !?
(…and hopefully most – it’s there to benefit all kids equally, not already-privileged parents seeking additional perks. Parents contribute, or not, according to their means without expecting individual gains)
Totally get that, but I couldn’t stomach the gross inequalities in the same school district.
Sorry to derail.
In our town they eventually started a “township-wide Schools Foundation”, that ran larger, district-wide campaigns and provided funding based on need, not based on neighborhood (where some schools might be more successful PTOs than others).
While the PTOs were obviously “current” parents, the Schools Foundation was a way for former parents and businesses to provide extra funding, which ultimately benefited everyone in real-estate appreciation.
It’s fundraising. Primary is to get money out of those who can most afford it. Ever done fund raising?
The idea is to actually ask the most from those who can afford the most to help those who can afford the least.
Yes!?
Our kids’ charter school has a boosters org instead of a PTO. Thankfully, there are no stupid “buy these overpriced magazines” fundraisers. All money raised for their annual teacher fund goes directly into teacher bonuses. No administrative overhead. It’s pretty great.
Back in the olden days when ODD was in K and 1st grade at a different school system, I went to 1 of the PTO meetings. What a train wreck that was. Total waste of time and money.
Yeah. Sorry. I tried to edit my somewhat snarky comment but it wasn’t happening. I’m sure you’ve done fund raising at some point.
D1 started kindergarten in 1997 and we joined the PTO for the school. It was a wonderful bunch of parents that just wanted to help fund programs our public school could no longer support (music, art, PE). During the time I was on the PTO we added a science teacher that we funded as well as paying for a librarian. At the time I was part of the PTO our fundraising was focused on asking for money from not only wealthy parents (one family paid for the librarian for 6 years), but also from the local business community. We did not have the kids sell a bunch of crap where we only got a small portion of the proceeds and we didn’t hold a big gala to raise money. Once my kids left the school a group of incoming parents really wanted the fancy gala to raise money so they started doing that. These types of events cost a lot to put on so once again it is money that does not go to the school unless you get someone with big bucks to underwrite it.
Our private school had an annual gala where things like storytime with the 4th grade teacher went for $25k. Lots of other 5 figure items. I didnt like it and didnt participate but I guess it kept tuition down.
I don’t know the town to state anything about their school district population.
As far as census, of 885 Boxford households, almost 200 ranged between 30k and 100k (meaning less than half the town’s average) in household income, 56 households only 60k and less.
Paid PTO membership isn’t unique to Boxford, where census data puts the median household income at $187,813, and where less than 1% of the population is estimated to live in poverty.