mouthybrat

I was wondering if anyone has any good ideas to help keep my son's preschool open. The school has been around for 20 years and is in jeopardy of closing due to lack of funding. This school has been the best experience for my 3 1/2 year old son, who would be devastated if they have to close after the new year.

The board has come up with a group yard sale that we are having on Nov. 22 and we are doing a pancake breakfast with Santa on Dec. 20th. We have sold candy bars, but stuff like selling items usually pulls from the same group of people and eventually that well runs dry.

Our enrollment is 19 students right now, we have room for 14 in our 3 yr class and 14 in our 4 year class. We have been advertising on the radio and television in an attempt to increase enrollment, but so far, it is not working.

Any ideas would be so helpful! I called Boxtops 4 Education yesterday, but preschools are not elegible for their assistance!

Help, please...

Thank you for taking the time to read this! I know it is off topic, but I feel like this discussion board is full of people who have great ideas and I need some of those right now!

playitagainenterprises

I am so sorry to hear that!! I do a lot of fundraising with the PTA and local youth associations. I know this may not sound like a big deal to most, but I have three kids that love thier school and they would also take it to heart. The yard sale is an awsome idea (for our area anyway). As far as running the well dry. We do suckers for our soccer team every year and that is the same as the candy bars, becuase they are an item on hand and easier to sell then having people order. We sold 500 hundred suckers at our local bowling alley on tournament night in about 30 minutes. We only pay .25 cents a sucker and sell them for a $1 each. You can take items on hand and sit in front of grocery and department store, if you have participating parents. Do you have a sonic in the area? My daughter cheers and they car hop for Sonic one Saturday and that usually raises $500-$700 hundred. Get a local department store to donate some supplys and make the kids some matching shirts and just go out each weekend and do things. This is all for small money. It sounds like you are already plently familar with fundraising so these are probably not new ideas for you. Silent auctions always seem to raise the most money for me. I would choose a huge event and find out about setting up a table for a silent auction. We did it on fathers day at the horse races one year for the childrens hospital and did really well.If this sounds like something you are intrested I will give you plenty of basket ideas and also personally refer you to someone for a ton of certified, autographed sports memborbilla. The sports memborbilla goes over real well in silent auctions.
Is the radio station donating this air time for the commercials? If not, maybe you could use more FREE pivot point marketing with all the time you all seem to be putting into this run a big fat (unbeatable) special and circulate some flyers thru the local schools. Also see if you could leave a stack of flyers with current job fairs. If you are not registerd with your local well fair office DO IT!! They will also bring in business and it will be deffinate income paid by the government for the child care programs that they offer. How much funding are you all lacking and how did you get in this postition? If you can get the funding to keep this preschool operating what are you guys going to do diffrently to not get back in this same position? I hate to see any educational system struggle and hope that yall can over come this. Oh yeah, one more big thing PRAY! I will pray for you as well. God Bless You All!


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mouthybrat

Thanks for the ideas! Our yard sale yielded just over $100.00
As for advertising, the radio was done as a favor to one of the parents. What happened here is that the local Community Action Head Start Program offers preschool for free, to qualifying parents that is, and they have a packed school! We only charge $53 a month for 3 year old classes and $70 a month for the 4 year olds. 3 year olds go two days a week, 4 year olds go 3 days a week. We are the cheapest in town, except for the Community Action one, of course!

Well, hopefully our Christmas Pancake Breakfast With Santa will do better!

BTW: Where did you get the suckers?

playitagainenterprises

Lollypops.com
good luck!

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[ This Message was edited by: playitagainenterprises on 2003-11-25 16:49 ]