Bake Sales and Check Drives

I have been involved with my kids elementary school PTA for 9 years.    In that time we have evolved from selling cookie dough to pay for field trips and art programs to launching major check drives and courting  corporate dollars to fund teachers salaries.   Although we still fund those original programs, our scope has grown so that our funding and support has had to replace what has been taken away as education budgets have been slashed.  

We are a middle to upper middle class school in a fairly large city in Southern California and have become a major source of funding for our school.   Elementary schools that do not have Title 1 money have budgets that barely cover the cost of running the school.   Anything that is considered above and beyond including supplies, books, emergency food blocks, computers and two teachers salaries  have to be supplemented by an outside source and that source in our school has been our amazing PTA.   In the last 10 years our total budget has tripled.  

We are not atypical.  Many PTAs through out California and the country are taking on similar responsibilities to try to maintain the level of education and resources that we believe our school needs in order to thrive.   In other words public education as we envision it is not free.   We at our local PTA have agreed to pay the price in money and time.  

The people (mostly women) who are running these PTAs are professional, educated people who are full or part time stay at home parents or who have managed to arrange their schedules to make volunteering at their kids school a priority.   All of the energy and talent that they had put into their jobs as professionals are now being used to write grants, raise corporate funds, run silent auctions, jog-a-thons, advocate at the local, state and federal level, volunteer in the classroom, run supplemental programs for the parents and children and yes occasionally a bake sale.