charging for school disco's, wwyd?

[charity2]

Tickets for the primary school disco are charged at £3 each. Approx £2.00 of that covers the drink, snack and dj costs for each child and the other £1 is profit for the school.

I am thinking that bearing in mind that £1 from each ticket is profit towards the school then the charge for tickets should be £3 for your 1st child and £2 for each additional child. I know it seems petty but there are many parents with more than 1 child and I think its a bit unfair to profit more than once from the same parents.

I am helping to organise this and want to suggest it but not sure how everyone will feel. I know that many people are struggling at the moment and to save £1 might not seem like much but for those with 3-4 children it all adds up.

Our PTA ran a school disco at 3 pounds per person and actually quite a few parents didn't send their kids as it was considered too expensive. I think the DJ was free (parent) and a cup of juice and a small snack was provided. The disco lasted an hour.

Ok, you want an answer as to wether her it is fair that all children benefit from the funds raised at a PTA event even if they don't attend.

The answer is yes, of course that is fair. PTAs are charities. They have a defined set of beneficiaries, and the beneficiaries are the pupils of the school that the PTA is associated with. You would not be able to have a PTA if the funds didn't benefit all the children in the school, you know that, and you are being obtuse by banging on with that question.

Apart from anything else, the disco is one event. I would have thought that the PTA you are on does more than one event a year. Just because a family isn't contribute to one thing, oes not mean they will not contribute to another. You couldnt keep track of every thing that every family did or didn't support anyway.

You didn't like my coat analogy, fair enough, as like you said, you would still want extra sibling to cover the cost of the disco you just don't think that you should make more profit from one family just because they have more than one child. So change my example to someone going into a shop to buy three coats for their three children. Should the shop only sell one coat at their normal retail price and then sell the two additional coats at cost? So that they are being paid for the materials but not making a profit on coats two and three?

Of course not. That would be silly. But it is the same as what you are suggesting. Charities do have to run like businesses. They even have to have business plans. If you can't see that the two things are the same then you need to open your mind a little and try to see something that you don't want to admit.

You also need to come to an agreement with the rest of the PTA about what the main aim of your disco is. If the aim is to raise money, then your idea really does defeat the point. If the aim is to have a disco so the children who want to go have some fun, then suggest your idea. If your PTA is clear that it wants to do both, then it can do that by charging full price to everyone and allowing parents to make their own descison about whether their children go, as they will anyway.

............The point I was trying to get across was that children who dont attend the disco still benefit and no one minds about that so why make larger families contribute per child to fundraising..............

The children who pay to go are benefiting from having a night out, that's what they are paying for. The other children do not have the disco. If a parent thinks that £3 is too much for the disco regardless of what money is left over then they won't send their child.

if you are charging and the main event is music you need to make sure you have a premises licence or an event licence and if you don't you can't charge at all!

OP, you are over thinking this. If you get involved in PTA events and expect it to be 'fair', you will get very frustrated (as a number of posters have pointed out). I'm the Secretary of our PTA and you just have to accept that there will always be those families who do not contribute (and equally those who contribute far more). We have had some parents who leave their kids in the disco queue with no money and leave!

If I was organising the disco I would stick to a ticket price for simplicity. At our discos money is collected at the door and managing multiple ticket prices (especially as we have separate KS1 / KS2 discos) would be a nightmare.

For what its worth, I think a charge per child is right and fair.

Op I get where you're coming from. However I also agree you are overthinking. Basically if a family chooses to support the pta they do it on a per child basis. If they choose not to, their children do still benefit from be funds raised. No it's not strictly fair but that's life I think.