While private schools have long been champion fundraisers, raising tens or hundreds of thousands for scholarships, capital building projects and endowments, public school communities have traditionally tended towards more modest efforts.

But that’s been changing—often in response to school budget cuts that galvanize parents to save valued programs or beloved teachers. In Manhattan, the P.S. 87 Parent Association has been pushing the envelope of parent-led fundraising for more than 15 years, and now raises over $200,000 a year.

In Beyond the Bake Sale, P.S. 87 parent and champion fundraiser Jean Joachim lays out a detailed description of a host of fundraising events and strategies. Connect for Kids Editor Susan Phillips talked with Joachim about some of the less obvious benefits of fundraising.

Raising money is hard work. Do parents and schools gain anything, beyond the money itself, from their fundraising efforts?

Definitely. They get a sense of community with other parents, and support from other parents. Whatever you are dealing with at home, this is an area where your efforts are valued.

It’s an opportunity for parents to establish friendships with other people who have children. They’ll understand better what is going on in their children’s school. And it often forges closer relationships with teachers and administration.

It’s very embracing, you don’t need to be an expert at anything, you don’t need to have money. There’s always room for someone who will bake a pan of brownies or make some phone calls.

And when you’re successful, there’s such an enormous sense of
accomplishment. When I go into the library at P.S. 87, I am
blown away by how magnificent it is, and I think, ‘That’s our cupcake
money.’”

So the parents get to feel good about what they’ve brought to the school, and the kids benefit from a better library or an arts program or whatever. What do the teachers get?

Well, I can say that P.S. 87 was better able to keep good teachers, because if they had an idea of something they wanted to do that was new and different, they could come to the board, and often get funded.

That brings up another question, which is how parent groups can best manage decisions about how to spend the money they raise. This can be tricky territory.

Parents need to be prepared—there’s always controversy over how to spend the money. Everybody has to compromise. At P.S. 87, what we have is a P.A.—Parent Association—not a P.T.A. And that makes a difference. It’s just parents. The elected leaders and committee chairs form a board, and there’s a committee of the president, vice president, treasurer et cetera who form a budget committee. All the fundraising committees submit budgets to that committee, which sets the budget for the school year.

I’m a big fan of re-budgeting in January. At that point, you know how your fundraising has kicked off, you know what’s going on with the official school budget. Sometimes things happen in the early part of the school year – a grant might fall through, for instance – that you need to respond to. It’s not a good idea to lock in your budget for a whole year.

Do the administrators and teachers have input into the budget process?

Not directly, no. The principal does get a discretionary fund, and the P.A. works closely with teachers and tries to be responsive to what they need. We’re very supportive of the teachers and administration, but it’s not a formal relationship.

A lot of school fundraising activities require some kind of teacher participation—whether it’s sending home notices or collecting money for class photographs. Is that a source of problems?

There are ways to make it easy for the teachers, and whenever parents plan a new fundraiser, they should look carefully at whether they are creating more work for teachers. They’re busy people.

But at P.S. 87, when you look at the library, and realize the second grade teacher can send half the class to the library and work with the other half on math because the P.A. is paying a librarian’s salary, you can see that there’s a payback there, resources for the teacher that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

It sounds like P.S. 87 has fundraising down to a science. It’s a little daunting. What’s your advice to parents who want to help their schools, but don’t have any experience or a strong parent association in place?

Every school can start somewhere. P.S. 87 started with bake sales. Some of the more elaborate money-making events, like auctions, require a group to spend money to make money. But you can minimize that…you can have a street fair without rides, for instance. You can have an auction without an expensive dinner, just hotdogs and chips.

Starting small is fine. What matters is how much the parents care about their kids’ education, and how much they want to take responsibility for it.

Joachim’s book, Beyond the Bake Sale: The Ultimate School Fundraising Book, is published by St. Martin’s Press. It’s full of practical information on dozens of fundraisers.

Resources:

• Visit Connect for Kids’ Toolkit for Funding

Talk Back

If you’ve got comments or questions about this story, we’d like to hear them. Send your response to Susan Phillips.