<p>Of course, selling stuff is small potatoes to the cheer booster club. I’m talking about the time commitment involved in chairing a silent auction, chairing bingo night, chairing the junior cheer clinic, etc…things that could become a full time job for months at a time.</p>
<p>^^^^^^^^^</p>
<p>As a father of a kid that cheered in HS, the expectation that “we will all have FUN together helping cheer” seemed to go with the cheer territory.</p>
<p>And the blowback from the moms and other girls was both real and seemed to go with that territory, too</p>
<p>It will take a strong parent to resist the compulsory volunteerism and a strong student to tolerate the blowback.</p>
<p>On the other hand, getting with the program only lasts a few years, right? :-)</p>
<p>Kei</p>
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<p>It seems like four years of my life consumed with non-stop fundraising that I don’t think is necessary or appropriate would go by really slowly…</p>
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<p>Yikes! What I would do (if you decide to let D cheer) is try to get in early on this and pick the least objectionable and time consuming one (something tells me that would NOT be the silent auction).</p>
<p>Wow…what do they do if you are a working parent (or a working single parent) and don’t have any time to give? Do they really penalize your child?</p>
<p>Are there any ECs these days that don’t require fundraising? If a team or club wants to travel or buy new equipment, fundraising is a necessity. </p>
<p>Besides showing support for your daughter’s interest, you may be surprised and enjoy making friends with other parents, as well as having a sense of satisfaction from supporting the school community. </p>
<p>DD, a three-sport athlete, always had fundraising activities. We presented new and more lucrative fundraisers, despite some opposition from the oldtimers. Instead of selling candy at games (a few hundred dollars over months), we started an annual reception/auction which netted $20K in a night.</p>
<p>The pleasure of getting to know the other students, faculty, and parents overrode the time demands. Four years can actually fly by, and your daughter may not even stay with the team. If she has her heart set on it, and makes the squad, how easy would it be to refuse to support her? </p>
<p>You can chalk up the time and expense as a cost of helping her find her passion (which is good for those college applications looming in the distance), and giving her the most precious parental gift of all: time.</p>
<p>I’m a current drill team mom. We do a lot of fundraising. We sell stuff at the football games. Junior dance clinic is tomorrow. Holiday market is in two weeks…we’ll all spend all day Saturday at that. Then a month later we’ll all show up early in the morning and unload and sort the hundreds of boxes of poinsettias. BUT, then it will end for a few months. We have about four big weekend events during the year and some smaller things.</p>
<p>But this is all NOTHING compared to what cheer does. It is relentless. When you see a cheer mom, you see a woman on the edge…like she could snap at any moment. It is close to indentured servitude. People pity me when they hear that my D wants to cheer.</p>
<p>Giving D the gift of time? I guess it would be time spent on her EC, but certainly not time *with *her.</p>
<p>When I ran a junior high sports team program, one of my objectives was to organize it so that my athletes parents had to do as little as possible. This was based on my cumudgeonly view that there were too many demands put on parent’s time. Let the kids do the activity, and then let them get on with other things as much as possible. </p>
<p>Someone told me that some of the exotic school trips that organizations do are motivated in part by some policy that exists which allows “scouting” trips by the coach or director…meaning they get a free vacation at some other time. I am not sure that this account was accurate, but it came from someone in a position to know. Cheerleading nationals in Tuscaloosa probably doesn’t present much of a motivation, but singing group tours to Europe and language class trips abroad are two that might.</p>
<p>I had a friend years back whose son was on a premiere travel soccer team, and most of our discussion about it had to do with his view that the coach was a self-interested moneygrubbing manipulator.</p>
<p>Missypie- well if it is that bad, can you convince D to stick with drill? It won’t do her any good if mom goes bonkers. (Though it could make for a good app essay.;))</p>
<p>Regarding the poinsettias: for a number of years I happily bought two poinsettias annually from a teen who was selling them for a sports booster club at the HS. They were very well priced, and always of superb quality. </p>
<p>Then she graduated! No one came by selling poinsettias!! </p>
<p>I was hoping that she would have passed on her customer list to another kid…I think that I am going to contact the HS and ASK to have a kid from that club come by.</p>
<p>(My S never sold anything to anyone. We have no local relatives.)</p>
<p>You mean there are EC’s that don’t require fundraising??? j/k S’s ec costs the students $500 a year and the parent group still fundraises almost year round because its costs thousands more to run the program. Talk about major fundraising - I have friends who’ll walk the other way when they see me coming. I’m always asking for donations or money. This year, we did an email campaign. S expained is a senior and is raising money for his EC program. He talked about how music and arts in the schools need a lot of support, etc. and he’s collected $400 so far. If this EC wasn’t S’s passion, i don’t know that I would be so supportive.</p>
<p>We’ve been lucky in that although our kids have been involved in activities that fundraised, the fundraising wasn’t mandatory and there were some parents who seemed more willing to do it.
One summer my daughter wanted to be in the local pool’s swim team. I told her OK, but on the condition and understanding that I was too busy with other activities for both kids to do anything to help. I remember when I went to one of the meets, and the leader-mom asked me to do something. When I declined, she looked at me as if I were Jack the Ripper. So you may have to be pretty hard-shelled to stick with a resolution to limit your volunteering.</p>
<p>This is why it is good if your child is the Goalkeeper on the travel soccer team. People will actually come and pick your child up just so thier child does not get stuck in the position. J/K, but true.</p>
<p>Missy, I feel for you. Sometimes it feels as if our lives are swallowed up by these kinds of activities and they really just eat away at us and run us ragged. Truly. When I turned 40 I asked for a “Not For Hire” sign for the roof of my car…I felt like poet’s limo service. I sometimes, even now, spend my entire evening driving from place to place.</p>
<p>But it is time I spend with D, who talks best in a car, anyway, so I see it as time well spent. OTOH, time with competitive mother types, and I “get” what you are saying here, sounds like torture to me, literally. Somebody has to step off of the carousel first in a community to get them to stop. The problem is that nobody wants to be the first to step off. “Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” is a relatively old, now, book, but very, very interesting.</p>
<p>Good luck. I hope you, your D and the powers that be can come to an easy (or uneasy) detente on this.</p>
<p>poetgrl - You speak the truth about the travel soccer goalie status! HaHa</p>
<p>Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. Do you really think it is appropriate to ask other folks, neighbors, coworkers, etc. to support your child’s extra curricular activities? It’s not like were talking about saving starving kids in Africa. Cheer, soccer, music, whatever it might be - I just cannot justify asking people I know - especially in this tough economic climate - to support my kid’s hobby. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I am constantly baking for bake sales, donating my time, etc. and will always order from any neighbor kid that comes selling at my door. However, I just don’t like it. I think it has gotten out of hand vs. when I was a kid 35-40 years ago.</p>
<p>Remember there are some people who LIKE chairing committees and organizing fundraisers. I wouldn’t dream of getting in their way.</p>
<p>I found myself with an EC when my son joined the robotics team at his high school. Unfortunately, a parent who was very involved with FIRST got very involved with this robotics team, and pressed the kids to fundraise! Schmooze! Write a business plan! And most of the kids who expressed interest in the team dropped out as a result. They didn’t want to raise the thousands of dollars that were necessary to participate in FIRST – they wanted to learn about robots! Build and program them!</p>
<p>There were a few parents – I was one of them – who tried to help; I spent WAY too much time on that stupid activity and really resented it. If the kids don’t want to do what it takes to participate in the FIRST competition, they don’t, and parents shouldn’t be pushed into doing it for them because one parent has a vision that NO ONE ELSE (except the school principal, who wanted this activity at this school for other reasons) shared or cared about. Ick. </p>
<p>My son had LOVED robotics… until he joined that stupid team with the one gung-ho clueless parent. This guy over-reached by a LOT, expecting that hundreds of people would show up at a fundraiser (they did not). I spent an entire day baking for this fundraiser (and those of you who know me from this site know that I can bake, and how, and a whole day of it means lots and lots and lots and lots of food), and most of the food just wasn’t needed. And never mind the hundreds of dollars worth of sandwiches and drinks and salads that were ordered for this fundraiser!! OMG, it was insane. Gave a party, and almost no one showed. It was sad. And not at all surprising, alas, despite this one parent’s assurances that “people will come! people will come!” (Yes, it took a bit for the rest of us to learn that, though he had been involved in FIRST for many years, he really had NO idea what he was doing, how to build a real team.)</p>
<p>My idea of a robotics club is one where kids get to build and program and play with robots; it’s not one that involves my son never touching any hardware, hours of physics lectures on a Saturday morning, and ME baking my oven mitts off to fund some ridiculous competition that none of the kids cared about. (No flames, please: FIRST is good for thems who wants it, but no one wanted it except this one parent driving the bus over the cliff and the principal.)</p>
<p>Not that I have any opinions or feelings about this… !</p>
<p>So missypie, I’m right there with you. If there isn’t money for the team to travel, the team doesn’t travel, and I don’t think it’s the parents who should be doing the bulk of the work. One of the points of the ECs is that the KIDS do them, run the show, whatever, outside of some limited adult-necessary details. If the kids don’t care about travelling – and I’d bet most of them just don’t! – why should parents have to work their hineys off to make sure the kids travel?</p>
<p>I understand the philosophy behind the mandatory participation in fundraising: avoiding the group being broken into to “haves” who can just cut a check, and the “have nots” who would otherwise not be able to afford the program. My kids know that I’m opposed selling anything to anyone. I HATED the magazine sales programs that would show the kids the cool stuff they could “earn” with certain levels of sales. The worst ever was a mid-day Limo-bus party for only the top sales kids. Ugh. </p>
<p>Luckily, nothing either of my kids participated in had mandatory fundraising. Our high school does a good job of offering “scholarships” to kids who can not afford activities. It is done discretely and behind the scenes. THAT I’ll give my money to.</p>
<p>DS’s E.C. is on an individual level and requires expensive travel. He’s been very resourceful in securing jobs to earn travel money. Much better than schlepping cookie dough to grandma, just saying…</p>
<p>owlice, you’ve reminded me of time when I learned that opening my big mouth could get me into trouble. When my kids were in elementary school, I baked my heart out for the bake sale. I made my “famous” double chocolate brownies from scratch, carefully wrapped each one and decorated them with ribbon…then I found out later when I delivered them that every item on the bake sale table was being sold for .25! It cost me so much more to make them!!! So, of course, I had to voice my opinion - and then found myself in charge the next year…</p>
<p>I like the idea of the kids raising money. Since when is it bad for kids to work for cash? One group of students put on a talent show. They raised $3000 -not much, but they had a great time and also learned a thing or two about business and organization! We were so proud of them. They did it all on their own.</p>
<p>lilmom, I’m the mom that brought in a bag of Keebler’s for the bake sale. Yep, never known for my culinary aptitude (have a story to tell on the turkey thread if I get the guts to confess.) Many years later, I do quite a bit of volunteering but am never ever enlisted on the food crew. Good seeds planted in the early day, I say.</p>
<p>Monetarily, it is far better to temper the wind to the shorn lamb than to fleece the parents, IMHO. It is worth asking whether the program is overly ambitious in scope or expectations if the fund raising burden is that harsh.</p>
<p>Ive participated in many booster organizations over the years, quite often on the financial end, both drawing up the budgets and then administering them. To me, the ideal approach is twofold: </p>
<p>Have a detailed budget that incorporates minimal fundraising conjoint with <em>reasonable and appropriate</em> participation fees to fund a <em>reasonable and appropriate</em> program; and,
Operate strictly within budget.</p>
<p>From my dual viewpoint as parent and financial officer, this is the best of all possible approaches to fund EC activities in the best of all possible worlds. Unfortunately, we live on Planet Earth, so not everyone views this as an enlightened approach. Sometimes those persons of dissenting opinion are supporting parents; sometimes they are the ones directing the program and spending the money. In the most awkward scenario, they are parents who work diligently to raise money and then spend it lavishly in an area they oversee as a volunteer.</p>
<p>A suggestion: Are there umbrella booster organizations at your school that cover like/associated activities? My experience indicates this is the most successful way to go to consolidate fund raising activities and share or spread that particular pain, however you so view it. It not only utilizes parental effort efficiently, but it also provides financial oversight through required financial reporting and thus yields insight on how similar groups operate relative to each other. A big, big, plus: mass fundraising nets a bigger yield, so its easier to subsidize students who need assistance. I have always seen carryover funds increase every year under this model, so there are more discretionary funds available over time.</p>
<p>This is a classic situation where it’s truly tough to balance the ideal-versus-reality equation as a parent. I do agree with others that it’s an excellent opportunity to talk honestly to your daughter about how to analyze a dual-edged situation. As we all know, she’ll face similar decisions with increasing frequency as she grows to adulthood. However, those dilemmas will continue to present throughout her life, and the window for participating in cheerleading is much narrower. A very hard call on how to best parent; good luck and best wishes to you.</p>