Thank you for asking about additional nonprofits. The Family Learning Institute (where I serve as Development Director) provides one-on-one, year-long, after-school tutoring and mentoring in reading, writing, math, and skills for academic and life success to over 100 children from households with low incomes. FLI relies entirely on donations in order to keep its services free of charge. Over 100 adult volunteers from the community make a year-long commitment to these students. FLI also offers summer programs, family literacy programs, and is launching formal partnerships with the schools to provide on site the kind of one-on-one after-school supplemental programs they are not funded or equipped to provide. To learn more, see [link].

Second, another way the PTO Thrift Shop helps PTOs (and other school organizations) is through giving a generous donation each time they post a thrift shop advert on an event brochure or website. It’s an easy way for PTOs to raise money, and explains why you always see their advert on the back of programs.

The Ann Arbor PTO Thriftshop provides funding to every single school through each school’s PTO organization. Our capable and caring executive director Ann Farnham made it her first matter of business to involve every school in the basic fundraising relationship with the shop. The schools have opportunities to earn money for their PTO’s by first assigning a member of their PTO council as a PTO Thriftshop representative. These reps support the advertising efforts of the shop by getting the word out to the school community about our hours, services, and programs, and also by running ads for the shop in school publications like weekly newsletters or event programs. The more they can promote the shop, the more the school can earn. There are other opportunities for earning throughout the year.

We switched from volunteers to paid staff a few years back, which led to great success in daily workflow and expansion of our business. We have recently begun to provide limited volunteer opportunities for community service, as there is a need in the community for such opportunities for both high school and college students to fulfill various service obligations.

In our most recent year of giving, 2013, we gave just under $300,000 ($297,244.33) to the Ann Arbor Public Schools via the PTO’s, or to pay for threatened services that would benefit the students directly, like restoring the middle-school late busing, and partnering with Comerica Bank to fund School Messenger. $100,000 of that each year is to a transportation fund. This fund is used for transportation activities of the PTO’s choosing, which we have seen from detailed use reporting often helps the schools waive fees for those families that could not otherwise afford the additional field trip expenses they are asked to pay. I should note that, in keeping with the context of the article, no PTO Thriftshop monies are given to the General Fund of AAPS. Our mission is to promote and enhance student enrichment activities. We believe the best way to do that is to get the money to the PTO’s, where parents, teachers and administrators can work together to distribute it equitably in their school.

Continued growth in donations (thank you Ms. Armentrout and others for thinking of us), and corresponding growth in sales has us planning to increase our giving this year to above the $300,000 mark. I would also like to point out that the year 2014 marks the 20-year anniversary of the founding of the Ann Arbor PTO Thriftshop. I encourage everyone in the community to donate and shop at the PTO Thriftshop, not only is it an environmentally sound practice to reuse and recycle, it makes good fiscal sense for you and the schools. And since we are a 501(c)3 you can make a targeted and tax-deductible cash donation, to the transportation fund, through our website [link]. There are a few days left in the tax year for those of you that itemize (hint,hint).

I would also point out that we practice complete transparency in our operations and giving; if anyone would like to learn more about the shop they can contact me or our executive director via our website for additional information. Thanks for your continued support!

Although I still support good public schools as an ideal and do not believe that a voucher system is a good idea, and support the AAPS indirectly through my property taxes, our education donations will be made to our current private school for now. I can only hope that AAPS will realize that the issues in our elementary school district were not ours alone, and that several families pulled their children out the same year that we did, for similar reasons. We plan to return for middle school and high school.

In the realm of supportive/”extra” educational services, I would add the public library system as another worthy cause and a way to support public education (full disclosure: I work at a library.) I know in Ypsi, our library provides arts and music programs for free to kids who are not getting it at school because the secondary ed. arts budget is precisely zero.

Finally, while these are all worthy causes, it’s upsetting that even $1M feels like a drop in the bucket, particularly when you realize that you will need to raise it again next year because our schools are being systematically underfunded. When the state has to create an EAA because so many school systems are failing, and an EFM system because so many cities are failing, it seems a good indicator that we have a big problem on our hands, and that it’s time making real change in how we fund our local entities.

In fact, they have numerous different ways to support PTOs. For instance, I think that some of the PTOs have volunteers work at the shop and the school’s PTO gets paid based on the number of volunteer hours. They also have special donation days for different PTOs where you use “tokens” to “vote” for various schools. And they make direct donations.

That’s also a good point because you can donate household goods and clothing to them, to sell in support of the local schools.

There is more information on their web site: [link]