Debate
Is School Fundraising Worth the Time and Effort?

YES
Connice Ross teaches special education at Germantown High School in Germantown, Tennessee. A teacher since 1979, she currently sits on the board of directors for the Shelby County Education Association and has served as a delegate to the NEA Representative Assembly.

Teachers are tired of being nursemaids, secretaries, janitors, medical technicians, wardens, bookkeepers, and vendors. Bell time is often consumed with what seems like a hundred housekeeping tasks.

The last thing we need is the hassle of coordinating the sale of a bunch of overrated junk. The question is, "Are school fundraisers worth the time and effort they take?" You bet they are!

Fundraisers have transformed my classroom program from one that is merely adequate to one with a variety of opportunities for students to grow and excel.

As a teacher in a brand new, self-contained program, I was overwhelmed to find a classroom with only three boxes on the shelves. Browsing the special education catalogs brought on a severe case of sticker shock: $150 for a tooth brush assembly kit, $500 for a reading program, $45 dollars each for board games. My budget for the year was $300!

My classroom is now overflowing with supplies and equipment: numerous kits, a reading program, a touch window for the computer, teletrainers, and more!

Our bonanza started with a Christmas gift sale and has become a classroom business, Functional Skills Inc.

We use a marketing strategy that incorporates vocational skills, math, language, and community-based instruction, and we shop for supplies to make or creatively package products.

Students help plan and produce advertising, including a full-color brochure. We keep inventory and balance our account complete with statements of gross income and net profit. We end each project by deciding how much to reinvest, purchasing targeted items, and planning a fun reward!

The class doesn't just earn money. The students learn a variety of skills and move toward meeting performance standards.

Other students know and support our efforts, and our program has gained recognition from the community. I have formed liaisons with community leaders and spend much less of my own money.

Until there is no longer a need for schools to raise money, educators should look for ways to make sales focus on more than finances and to shift responsibility off teachers and onto as many shoulders as possible.

Here are some suggestions:

• Encourage each child to contribute time, energy, and ideas.

• Provide a service for the community and school.

• Cut out the middle man.

• Be creative. Do something unusual. Hold a sale of student art or a matching plant flower sale, where customers buy plants for themselves and school flower beds.

• Limit fundraisers to a few quality events each year.

• Stress teamwork.

• Share responsibility with parents, grandparents, business leaders, and the community at large.

Fundraisers are a must for many schools. For others, they help make the difference between being adequate or being exceptional. Until every school is an exceptional school let's keep fundraisers, and let's make them fundraisers that raise more than dollars.

Voting Results | Forum

NO
Del Patterson teaches seventh grade geography at Sapulpa Middle School in Oklahoma. A teacher with 26 years' experience, he has also served as an NEA local affiliate president, an Oklahoma Education Association delegate, and a delegate to the NEA Representative Assembly.

In a recent conversation with my state senator, I was taken aback when he iterated a checklist for spending some $2 billion Oklahoma will receive from tobacco settlement monies. You probably know what words came tumbling out: prisons, highways, bridges, industry, veterans. Not one word about public education.

Is it any wonder why Oklahoma educators feel compelled to compete for consumer dollars by using children as the source of labor?

If you can say "exploitation," you probably already have a good idea about what's wrong with the ubiquitous activities called "fundraisers" that are occurring in a classroom near you.

The scenario goes something like this: An assembly is called, and students get pumped up and tantalized by the flashy rewards they can win for exercising their Amway-like sales skills.

Then, of course, daily classroom interruptions follow ad infinitum while students, from pre-schoolers to seniors, busy themselves selling entertainment discount books, chocolate bars, tulip bulbs, sausage, and greeting cards.

These students are being used. They usually receive a cheap carnival-like toy for their labor, while the profiteers and the school haul in lots of cash.

The rationale for entrenching such marketing programs at a place called school defies logic. Imagine the headline: High School Band Wins Bid to Perform at Super Bowl! Are band members rewarded for their hard work and proficiency as musicians? No, they must "sell, sell, sell!" in order to be rewarded. Bring forth the fundraiser!

There are, of course, other major concerns we as educators should take into account before we send our children into the fundraising frenzy:

• Safety. It doesn't take an IQ over the temperature of table water to grasp the safety risks of students selling door-to-door.

• Time off task. By playing the fundraising game, we allow more time to hemorrhage away from the subject areas we teach, all in the name of commercialism.

• Extra duty. As if we aren't already work-saturated, fundraisers pull us away from our real mission--helping the child, teaching the lesson.

• Student self-esteem. An inordinate number of students arrive at school unable to buy lunch, let alone goods from fundraisers. Yet we let schools create cultures that press these students to buy, buy, buy.

I find it repugnant that schools are signing exclusive agreements with cola companies or Channel One to help fund education, but using children as a means to line the pockets of marketers, just so a school can buy more basketballs, is even more inimical to what schools should be about.

We have lost sight of the operative word in public education, and that word is free.

Upon ending that recent conversation with my senator, I reminded him, "One day, our schools will have all the money they need, and the Air Force will have to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." Alas, as our talk broke up, no student showed up to sell him a jar of jelly.