At last night's PTA meeting we discussed some potential fundraising requests from the administration that totaled around $53,000. I want to try to put that amount into the perspective of what other elementary schools in the district are doing in terms of dollars raised.
This interesting report from the Seattle Council PTSA shows total school funding for all schools in the district for the 2005-2006 school year. The "Self-help" column can be used to evaluate PTA funding (there are a couple of other items in that bucket, which are explained at the bottom, but I don't believe they're very significant overall).
You can see that the total amount of "Self-help" funding for all elementary schools was over $3.6 million, for an average of over $56,000 per school. When you take a closer look at the numbers you can see that there is a huge discrepancy among fundraising among the schools — a couple of schools brought in over $250,000 while a few others raised less than $5,000. The median amount raised by elementary schools was around $30,000.
I don't expect Graham Hill to ever "catch up" with some of these other schools simply due to demographics, but there's definitely room to grow our fundraising efforts.
