PTO Today

Check out this article about a North Carolina elementary school that is getting their students moving to raise money for their school. The Hendersonville Elementary School PTO put together a fundraiser called “Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds: Move Across America.”

How does it work? Kids choose different ways to exercise and each way has mile equivalent associated with it. Then the kids log their exercise and total up the miles. The goal of the school is to exercise for 24,902 miles. That’s the distance around the earth! Wow!

What a great way to inspire healthy habits, sharpen math skills, and build community at the same time!

Had a chance to sit down yesterday with Jon Carson, the founder of web auction services cMarket and Bidding for Good. Before that, Jon was founder of Family Education Network. (Yes, he’s been busy.)

We’ve been following trends with school auctions for years now, and cMarket’s work in that space has been the most interesting recent development. First, it was just adding online bidding to your traditional school auction. That’s worth a look in its own right. More recently, though, the offering has gotten even better, as cMarket now has a host of items that you can add to your auction at no risk to you. Things like vacations and hotel nights that can only add dollars to your auction’s bottom line. I know the auction chairs at my children’s school used cMarket for the first time last fall and – besides some nice results from adding online in general (they placed several of the silent items into an “online only” category) — they also made nearly $1,000 extra just from the items that cMarket added to the auction.

The upshot: if your group is running an auction, definitely worth exploring how cMarket can help you make it better. URL = www.cmarket.com

Here’s a creative fundraising idea that involves the entire community and beyond. Piggybacking on a popular annual event, 3 PTOs in Newburyport, Massachusetts are working together to run a kitchen/home tour. 12 Kitchens around the city to check out. Proceeds will go to the city’s three elementary schools. Sign me up!

Our blog readers always get this scoop first….

So it looks like our 2010 Expo schedule is firming up.  The cool news — several more Expos in 2010 than in years past.  There will be 8 or 9 in the 2nd semester of this coming school year.

Old stalwarts Boston, Philly and Chicago?  Check.

Coming back to Columbus and Minneapolis? Check.

Bringing the band to Houston, St. Louis and Tennessee?  Hmmmmm.

Watch for complete details and dates in August. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update?  Subscribe to our e-newsletter, the Leader Lowdown.

Came across this interesting article about how one school board is saying no to using extra funds to hire teachers.. What it boils down to is one school fundraised enough money to offset the costs of cultural events, field trips, technology and more. As a result, the principal was able to use operating expenses to fund a technology teacher.

Recently their county school board announced a new policy that states that principals will no longer be able to hire extra teachers for their schools using operating funds. The reason: budget and equity concerns. The result: no more technology teacher, one very unhappy school parent group! Tough economic times mean tough budget and policy decisions all around. It also raises the question of what should PTO and PTA groups pay for?

On the business side of the PTO world, a couple of us from PTO Today had a great meeting last week with the folks from Rhode Island Novelty and Fun Services.   Nice guys, and very interesting company.  We got a tour of a ha-uge (very huge) warehouse filled with every kind of carnival prize and plastic snake and stuffed animal you can imagine.  My kids = very jealous.

The key point is that Fun Services is very much still going strong.  There had been some questions about what would happen, because Fun Services was technically a part of a big behind-the-scenes fundraising company called “Giftco”, which went into bankruptcy.   But the various Fun Services franchisees have been working throughout the transition, and now are on even stronger ground with the Rhode Island Novelty folks.

Will keep you informed of any other developments.

Have you been to our clip art gallery recently? Worth a visit — we’ve added lots of new colorful images so you can jazz up your flyers and newsletters.You can download any or all of these high-resolution image files, then resize, crop, or edit them in any way that works for your group’s needs. They’re free for parent group use in print, online, or anywhere else.

For those of you who have been involved with a playground fundraising effort, you know that it’s an ambitious and rewarding project. Just look at the faces of the children at a new playground grand opening and all your efforts are instantly rewarded.

The tenacity of the elementary school PTA featured in this recent article is admirable. To date they have raised 37K and secured matching grant funding.But what makes it even better is that they are holding a barbecue and silent auction to raise even more money. Why? To replace the gravel on the playground with compressed wood chips — a wheelchair-friendly product that will let their special-needs preschoolers enjoy the playground. That’s going to be one awesome playground.

Always love it when a PTO project gets completed successfully.   In this case — thanks to the PTO — this school backyard no longer looks directly into an active cemetary.

Love it even more when a Lowe’s Toolbox for Education grant is a big part of the reason why the project worked.. 

Nice.

This issue is creeping its way across the country.  Here, a PA district and its parent groups deal with after-effects of a lawsuit-driven ban on backpack express announcements.

My take on why these backpack express bans are nonsense was posted a few weeks back.