PTA raffle-all 4 of the Chair’s kids won the top prizes

[PTAcoincidence]

There was a PTA raffle at school this week to win Easter egg baskets. There were 4 huge baskets with around 10-12 eggs in each along with about 30 smaller baskets with a variety of eggs in them. Some had more eggs than others so between 3 and 6 eggs per basket. Lots of prizes, lots of happy kids at the Easter Fayre.
The raffle was drawn out of sight before the Fayre began with the dad of the 4 winning kids removing one huge basket from school before the rest of the baskets were even made up. Eyebrows were raised but you don’t cross the PTA mums I’m told.
Tickets were £2 each and approx 500 tickets purchased in total so a great fundraiser for the PTA. The chocolate was donated by the kids in exchange for wearing their own clothes as is the norm.
It is usually the PTA kids who win competitions, get chosen for the main
parts in plays etc and lots of parents roll their eyes and accept that’s the way it happens.
All 4 kids winning the top 4 prizes though? Surely that’s highly unlikely to be random and takes the biscuit? Or the Easter eggs in this case!
My dc won something and is very happy about winning so it’s not a case of sore loser before anyone accuses me of jealousy.

If this happened at your school would you think it was fixed or just luck?

YANBU = Fixed
YABU = Luck

Our primary PTFA draw it on a “live” video, but every time I’ve tried to watch it live, there’s been a “glitch” or an issue or something that means it’s not able to be posted until a day later. Funnily enough it’s the PTFA ladies drawing a ticket, it cuts to the hamper/gift box prize and then they read out the name.
Every year we have put in for tickets. We won once - when I was out of work and volunteered to help the PTFA, made signs for the Christmas fayre, supervised the disco, went to all the meetings etc.
The second I stopped volunteering, the woman who stepped into my “slot” started winning the same hamper we had won the first year.
I think they all fix it!

I’d definitely want to speak to the Head about this. I think I’d say that even if nothing untoward is going on, it looks incredibly suspicious. I’d ask the Head if they can arrange a public raffle draw in future as this should protect the school and the PTA from allegations of fraud.

Not all schools fix it and none should!

We did once have rather enthusiastic young raffle ticket sellers who managed to sell both halves of some of the tickets. Luckily, all the tickets had been sold on the night, so the buyers were still there. Before the draw, an announcement was made explaining the mistake and asking the holders of certain ticket numbers to bring their tickets to be replaced.

If the mistake had been left uncorrected, it could have been a very profitable raffle, but it wouldn’t have been right, as some tickets had zero chance of winning!

Yes it sounds like they might be. We did a raffle at the school I worked in and sold the tickets in advance. We had to apply for a licence from the council. The tickets should state the name and address of the organiser (ours was the headteacher). And the date of the draw.

If the tickets are sold and drawn on the same day they don’t need a licence, they would probably use those books of cloakroom tickets.

There was a girl in our class who ALWAYS won the raffle because everyone else's parents gave them 50p or whatever for one ticket, and her dad would hand over 50 quid, because he's a kind soul (genuinely, you won't find anyone with a bad word to say about him) and it was for charity. It never occurred to him that his generosity would be viewed poorly, and his daughter used it to buy herself a 'win' pretty much every time. Not a deliberate fix, just ended up that way, unfortunately.

As I stated in my opening sentence, this wasn’t the worst I’ve seen - that involved legal action being brought in to force a different chair to step down over multiple, serious acts of corruption.
But “not unusual” doesn’t make something acceptable. Normalising it just makes it worse. These are people supporting their community in good faith - and deliberately rigging things to squeeze more money out of them is plainly dishonest. If you genuinely think that’s acceptable, then I think you need to give your moral compass a good, hard tap.

If it’s an online system to purchase tickets then the same system can do the draw. Our school pta uses it to avoid accusations of this nature because as someone else said upthread, pta members sometimes win more because they buy more tickets.

There are lots of automated ticket sites that also do the draw, it wouldn’t take much research to see if your school is using one.

Why won’t you say anything? There’s a clear conflict of interest and PTAs are registered charities, you absolutely should be raising this.

There’s a lot of money passing through them and if you have suspicions you should raise it, ask to see the charity accounts.

They cheated.

Raffles like these are always drawn in front of the audience and the winners come up to claim their prize.

Very embarrassing for them to be this grabby.

Bloody hell. I didn’t realise the PTA took tombolas so seriously.
I don’t remember even having a tombola at our school. Maybe at one of the end of term fetes.

Obvious fix! So blatant that it's comical!

Surely a raffle draw has to be made in public?

If I was either of the parents I’d have put the prizes back in the raffle after the first win, I did this myself when I won two prizes in our local pub raffle.

I think I might try and find out properly because with People's Fundraising you don't get paper tickets and it's autodraw.

I really think you should - this is awful. Also shouldn’t there be some sort of separation of duties? Sadly people defraud charities.

I would also raise issues about the chair and the treasurer being married to each other. Usually if you have a bank account for a PTA or other voluntary organisation it requires double authorisation on payments to prevent one person clearing the bank account - that is clearly an issue when the two people with access to banking and to countersign cheques are married to each other.

Not all PTAs are registered charities - ours wasn't - but there were still rules about getting accounts audited and available for inspection by anyone who asked.

Tombola's are usually easy to do.
My PTA always did a Bottle Tombola and people just needed to donate a bottle of something (wine, bubble bath, bottle of squash, tomato sauce etc).
Cheap to donate so we always got loads.
We usually had a few "booby prizes" like a bottle of plain water but mostly the prizes were equal-ish.
It was a really profitable stall.
Personally I would have preferred it to be fully non-alcoholic because it was a primary school and the children obviously weren't allowed to take the alcohol if they won.

It is dishonest @EstherOnions I agree, and especially mean if kids are involved hoping to have a chance to win a decent prize.

Our PTA has a joint bank account. One signatory is the chair or treasurer of the PTA and the other is the HT or DHT.

Same!

As many have said, draws need to be done in public by a unconnected party.

Of course they do, and thus - must be kept on side!! Same thing used to go on at my children's primary school.
The PTA were (mostly) a load of obsequious buttkissers.

Normally because that can take ages.

'Pink 57, 57, 57, pink, 57, anybody got 57? Oh, she's gone home? You've got her on the phone? Umm, what's there? All the prizes, no I can't see if there's one that's dairy free. Let's go on to the next. Blue 270. Blue 270. Great, let's see your ticket. They're the greens, pinks, yellow, blue 270. That's 217. BLUE 270. Anyone? Only 25 to go.'

@NeverDropYourMooncup the trick is no more than a dozen prizes.

Nah - if you label the prizes with a ticket you get what you are given - we ask parents to write name and number on the slip so we text if they win and they collect it from school the next day (if they don’t stick around for the draw)