By Grace Berry
(@gracevberry)
Two weeks ago, teacher Lance Burmeister’s College Business class started a fundraising project. The job of the students in class was to come up with a business plan to raise money for Central School in Mt. Prospect.
Central School came to the Prospect administration and asked if they could put up signs and buckets around the school to raise money for renovations in the school. Not a lot of people knew about the fundraiser, and it wasn’t raising a lot of money, so it was given to Burmeister.
He thought it was a good experience for his class so they could try to figure out how to make this fundraiser better. The class just finished a chapter on social responsibility, so he thought it would fit well.
“I’m always open to trying to find real world experiences that tie into the curriculum we’ve been looking at so it’s not just studying a book and talking about terms,” Burmeister said.
Senior Katy Doherty explained they developed a business plan together and then split the work up. Some people advertised, and others collected and counted money raised at lunch.
The class came up with the idea to have students vote for the teacher they wanted to dress up in costume and what costume they wanted the teacher to wear, but to to vote, people had to put change in the buckets his class set up at lunch. The buckets were labeled with teachers’ names and costume ideas on them. The teacher that had the most money in their bucket will have to dress up in the costume that had the most money in it.
According to Doherty, they had put together this fundraiser pretty fast, but it was pretty fun overall. Doherty explained the fundraiser could have been more successful, but that any money will help the school’s renovations. Burmeister agrees that the class could have used more time for the fundraiser.
“We didn’t have a sufficient amount of time in order to really figure out what to do with this [fundraiser],” Burmeister said. “But we did what we could.”
Burmeister explained he didn’t really have a set goal in how much money he wanted to raise;he just wanted to give his students the experience of running a fundraiser.
“This is one of those things where I threw it out there to see what they could come up with, to give them the opportunity to see what it was like to put something like this together, [and] to see what it was like to have to run something like this,” Burmeister said.