The secret world behind school fundraisers

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 February 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fundraising is a staple of the school experience in the U.S. There's an assembly showing off all the prizes kids can win by selling enough wrapping paper or chocolate to their neighbors. But it's pretty weird, right?

Why do schools turn kids into little salespeople? And why do we let companies come in and dangle prizes in front of students?

We spend a year with one elementary school, following their fundraising efforts, to see how much they raise, and what the money goes to.

The school – Villacorta Elementary in La Puente, California – has one big goal: To raise enough money to send every single student on one field trip. The whole school hasn't been able to go on one in three years.

We find out what the companies who run school fundraisers do to try to win a school's business. And we find that this bizarre tradition is ... surprisingly tactical. That's on today's episode.

Today's show was hosted by Sarah Gonzalez and produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:20.0	Some of you may have had these assemblies in school, like in elementary school or in high school.
0:28.0	There's music, the lights are dim, and some non-school person is on stage like don't you want this glow in the dark
0:36.4	bike or how about a limo for you and your friends to go to Peter Piper Pizza just
0:41.4	look at all these prizes.
0:44.3	He was just like, and this bubble blower,
0:49.7	and then he's like we have a dancing space stuck.
0:53.0	I don't know if you know what this is actually.
0:55.0	Nintendo Switch Light!
0:57.0	I'm talking about assemblies like this one.
1:00.0	My name is Mr. Cheesecake.
1:11.0	Mr. Cheesecake, really Andrew Smith, known for getting students to sell cheesecake. Because yeah, to win some of these prizes we have the radical rocket kid scooter
1:17.0	We're gonna have what we call the squish ball
1:20.9	You have to sell stuff like cheesecake or wrapping paper or little chocolate bunnies
1:28.6	We sold little pauquins and candies.
1:33.6	There was chocolate bears with peanut butter inside.
1:37.4	There was chili lemon peanuts,
1:40.0	chili lemon mangoes. I remember the the jalapengue. Chili lemon mangos
1:42.6	I remember the jalapeno popcorn
1:45.8	and the more you sell the better the prizes
	...

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