The one thing I love about my daycare is that they don’t raise the school rates. We’ve been with them for over 18 months and our montly rate is the same as it was in July 2006. The owner of the daycare has said she’ll do everything in her power NOT to raise our rates.
That’s awesome.
One way they earn money for the things they need (whether it’s new equipment, new teachers, or fixing up space) is to ask the parents to do fundraising, much like when your kids come home from regular school with brochures filled with candy bars or gift tins. Almost every single time we have found that we have NO success in selling such items. They attempted last year to sell pizza gift cards and I don’t think ANY got sold. Then they tried selling those entertainment books – we managed to sell five, including one to ourselves. That was pretty surprising, but I doubt every parent was that successful.
There is a new website out – it’s really just a shell at this point. It’s called Shoutback and it claims to be a great new method for fundraising in your community. I went through the entire website and couldn’t find much content – I couldn’t find any specific groups that had already been created, but it claims that it uses auctions as it’s method for fundraising. Unfortunately, there was no “About Us” type page on which they went into detail about their services and how it works. So I’m not sure why they think people will sign up any time soon. Perhaps in the future, if they actually build some content on the website, it’ll be worth checking out. But for now – it’s not really something my daycare can consider using mostly because even if they sign up there’s no telling what they are actually signing up FOR.
The fundraiser my school is doing right now is an out and out donation from the parents in order to buy a reading loft for one of the classrooms. We chipped in $40 even though they are only asking for $20 from each family. It’s the least we can do, considering the daycare owner hasn’t raised our rates in 18 months.
The one fundraiser I do take advantage of is offered by our local elementary school. They have really nice quality wrapping paper, for all seasons, and they come around each Sept. to get your order and deliver around the first of December.
During the years that my kids were in school, the fundraisers were the supreme pet peeve of my life. Every time there was a fundraiser the stress level in our house increased five-fold. I finally started refusing to take part. I offered to write a check for almost any amount, but I was not going to subect my kids (or us!) to trying to sell trinkets or candy bars to family and friends who bought out of guilt…and I refused to put up with the pressure to sell more and more and having my girls teased by kids who sold more. They thanked me every year for not making them sell anything…