A PTO treasurer at a Title I school in New York told us about the part of fundraiser week she dreads.
"There's kids that will never get a donation," she said. "It causes a lot of sadness."
Her school's fun run is a good program, and it's the biggest money-maker on the calendar by a wide margin. What she was describing sits underneath the money, and it's what her teachers mention most. Some kids come to school with a network that gives, and some kids don't. A fundraiser can make that difference visible to a seven-year-old.
We heard some version of that worry across the 69 conversations we had with PTO leaders, principals and teachers this year. It came up from happy customers and from schools that turned us down. It was one of the concerns our independent researcher heard most often.
So we went looking for the schools that had solved it. Seven decisions kept showing up, and most of them cost nothing at all!
Designing a fundraiser every kid can join, in seven lines
This is bigger than any one school's prize table, and researchers have been tracking it for decades.
Kalil, Steimle and Ryan followed how parents spend time at their children's schools from 1996 to 2019. Their study pooled national survey data from roughly 116,000 households and ran in AERA Open in 2023. Across most kinds of school involvement, the gap between higher- and lower-income families narrowed or held steady. Fundraising was the exception. It's the one place where that gap grew.
The dollars follow the same line. Chicago Public Schools changed its funding formula to send more public money to high-poverty schools. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland then looked at private fundraising. It offset 23% to 35% of the equity gain the policy was built to deliver (working paper, 2024). High-poverty schools received $2,021 more per pupil in public funds. Low-poverty schools raised $500 to $700 more per pupil on their own.
This reaches a lot of children. In fall 2022, 24.9% of US public school students attended a school where more than 75% of students qualified for free or reduced-price meals. That figure comes from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics. Under USDA rules, a child qualifies for free meals at or below 130% of the federal poverty guidelines, and for reduced-price meals up to 185%.
Families everywhere are also being asked to stretch further. The National Center for Education Statistics found that 52% of parents took part in school fundraising in 2022-23, down from 57% four years earlier. Volunteering fell faster, from 43% to 36%.
Schools should keep fundraising. The research simply raises the stakes on design, because a format that only works for families with money widens a gap that's already growing.
The encouraging part is where the fix lives. Every one of the seven decisions below is a choice your committee makes, and most of them cost nothing.
Everything else hangs on this one. In a catalog or product fundraiser, a kid who sells nothing gets nothing and does nothing. The fundraiser is the selling. Move to an event and you get to break that link on purpose. Every Apex program is built this way, with nothing to sell and no order forms to chase.
An associate principal in San Antonio, six years into running Apex at her school, put the standard plainly. Everybody gets a T-shirt. Everybody runs. She's a Title I teacher by background, and a parent of kids who, in her words, "would sit there and get nothing" during sell-based fundraisers.
A PTO advisor at another Apex school had watched rewards tied to fundraising penalize the families who could least afford them. She called it "a big thorn in my side." So she changed the rules, and every child now joins the celebration, like the class ice cream social, whether or not they raised money. Her school's Apex event now out-raises every other fundraiser in the district.
Ask a principal in Asheville what changed and she'll skip the money entirely. "Everybody's having the same amount of fun," she said, "whether you raise $500 or 50 cents."
A fundraising lead at an 85% free-lunch STEAM academy named the problem she was escaping. Her students, she said, got left out of some fundraisers when they couldn't sell things. Her fix was a prize every child could earn just by signing up and sending one email.
One moment tells you it's working. An assistant principal in Las Vegas called it the hidden gem of their Apex run: "nobody knows who didn't donate."
Set the bar there. Nobody should be able to tell who needed including.
Most fun runs carry a design flaw that nobody catches until a parent points it out.
Prizes handed out daily, in front of the class, turn a two-week fundraiser into a two-week ranking of whose family has money. A PTA co-president in Charlotte watched it happen. It was hard for certain kids to see other kids coming home with prizes every day. A PTA vice president in Buffalo said some kids probably walk away feeling bad, because they already know they won't get those prizes.
The fix costs nothing, and it came from a parent who happens to be a school social worker. Take it out of public view.
Schools that made this switch describe the same moves. Prizes go into backpacks, cubbies or lockers at the end of the day. They arrive in two or three bulk waves across the event, so there's no daily parade. At one Apex school in Houston, the PTO moved prize handouts off the recess yard and gave them to teachers.
A principal at a Catholic school in New York saw the other end of this. Some of her families are on food stamps, and one student took home a giant inflatable hamster ball. That image sticks with a class for a long time.
A PTA treasurer at an Apex school in New York loves that every child gets the bracelets, whether or not they fundraise. Prizes go home in a bag, right into the student's locker. When everyone gets something small every day, the occasional bigger prize stops being the scoreboard.
A special-education preschool teacher in Las Vegas runs the Apex fundraiser at her school. It has seven self-contained classrooms and students who use wheelchairs. She described her team's rule in one sentence.
"If everybody can't do it, we're not gonna do it."
Her Apex team was fully on board, so they built accessible sections into the course, and every child took part. The school beat its goal.
Other schools solved the same problem in different ways, and the variety is the useful part:
The format you pick does a lot of this work for you. Apex's Remix is a glow dance party with no running at all. The Glow Run moves everything indoors. The Obstacle Course is built as a confidence builder that kids climb and conquer at their own pace.
Whatever you choose, the best partners bring accommodations you hadn't thought to ask for. Hold any partner to that standard, including us!
A family's gift should never decide whether their child feels part of the event. Two habits make that real.
Say "any amount" out loud. A principal in Ohio explained why it matters. Families can give what they're capable of giving, and their kids are still able to earn the prizes. Put that sentence on the flyer, in the parent email and on the pledge page, in plain words.
It matters more than it sounds. In a 2019 national poll of middle and high school families by C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, only 7% of parents had ever asked for a school activity fee waiver. Another 19% said they wouldn't know how to ask. An option families can't see might as well not exist.
Make mistakes easy to fix. An Ohio school's event lead caught an English-language-learner family who had accidentally over-pledged, and got it corrected before it was charged. An assistant principal in Las Vegas sees the same thing every year with grandparents who misread the form. The answer is always the same: don't worry about it, we'll fix it.
Build that conversation into your plan before you need it. Name a person, write the friendly reply in advance, and put a contact line on every pledge page.
Class-level goals are the standard equity fix, and they work. They also fail in one specific way that a treasurer named precisely. At her school, the same two classrooms just run away with it, and then no one can catch up.
If the same class always wins, a collective goal is just a bigger scoreboard.
One fix is rotating the challenge type, so the winning condition keeps changing. Apex programs build this in, with fresh challenges every day of the two weeks. A principal at an Apex school in Texas says the team runs every class reward themselves, so a win feels like a real moment for the whole room.
The other half of the fix is rewards that cost nothing. A principal in Ohio built his whole incentive structure out of experiences: a dance party, lunch with a friend, extra recess.
Apex has moved this way too. A school leader in Las Vegas noticed her Apex class rewards had shifted to shared ones, like a shoes-off day, a cozy day, a chalk party and game time. "It seems much more collaborative," she said. A charter school in North Carolina removed individual prizes entirely as a policy. For them, it has always been about experiences with each other.
A PTO board member in North Carolina ran a bingo card of non-monetary challenges and got roughly 90% participation.
And the best-value incentive we came across came from a PTO president in North Carolina. Let the kids pie their own teacher. Her donations jumped, because every class suddenly had something personal on the line!
At one Apex school, families speak 28 languages. At the planning meeting, the local Apex team asked about every one of them so they could reach each family in a language they read.
Too few schools get that far. A school administrator in Texas serving Afghan refugee families asked whether materials come in Pashto, Farsi and Telugu. An administrator in Houston described a district where families speak hundreds of different languages. A teacher in Nevada relies on Spanish translations because many of her families work casino and hotel shifts, and the kids relay the news home.
Two things to check beyond the words:
Digital access isn't universal. The same Texas administrator pointed out that a refugee child may not have ten email addresses to send to. A pledge model built on emailing your family network assumes a family network with email. Offer a paper path and a text-message path too.
Look at the images. A principal in Ohio, whose school is half Nepali, has been burned before. A vendor's character-education materials weren't diverse, and it upset families. He now previews lesson content for cultural fit before it reaches his kids. It's a reasonable ask, and any partner should say yes to it.
This is the piece that changes the equity math, and it's the one most schools miss.
A PTO advisor at an Apex school said reaching people beyond the neighborhood "opened up a door of revenue that the school hadn't really considered." Grandparents, aunts, former neighbors, the family friend three states away.
One New York PTA leader watched kids call Grandma and Papa to ask for another $50, "and they do." A development director at a Catholic school in New York sent a few emails as a parent during the school's Apex event. A college friend sent $25, having never given to her kids' school before.
On our own platform, more than 70% of donations come from outside the student's household.
Sit with what that means for a low-income family. The ask isn't on them. Their child's job is to share a link with the people who love them, and those people live all over the country. A fundraiser built on peer-to-peer sharing only asks a kid to be connected.
It's also why product sales struggle in these communities. A principal in Ohio put it plainly: for his Nepali families, selling wrapping paper and candy just isn't marketable. You can't ask a family to move inventory in a network that doesn't buy that inventory. You can ask a child to share a link.
That's how every Apex program works. Each student gets their own pledge page to share with family near and far, and our team runs the digital platform and the family communication for you. See how an Apex program works.
| Decision | What it costs | Who it helps most |
|---|---|---|
| Separate the running from the raising | Nothing | Kids whose families can't give |
| Hand the prizes out privately | Nothing | Kids who'd otherwise watch from the side |
| Build the course for every body | Staff time and some setup | Students with disabilities or sensory needs |
| Make any gift feel like enough | Nothing | Families on tight budgets or new to the forms |
| Rotate who can win | Nothing | Classes that never take the top spot |
| Translate and check the pictures | Translation budget or staff time | Families who read another language |
| Widen the circle past the household | Nothing | Kids whose own household can't give |
Everything above works whether you hire a partner or run it yourselves. In an Apex program, most of it comes built in. We design the two weeks around the kid whose family can't give, so that kid gets the same experience as everyone else.
The last piece is the hardest one to put on a flyer. Our athletes bring the same energy and care to every student. They play the games with all of them, cheer every kid across the line, and treat the student who raised nothing exactly like the one who raised the most. Students see the same faces every morning for two weeks, and that's a big part of why kids still remember their Apex team a year later.
We're not only interested in your bottom line. We care just as much about every kid on that blacktop, and they can tell!
Yes, and several of the Apex schools we interviewed prove it.
A quick definition, since the label gets used loosely. A school can run a schoolwide Title I program when at least 40% of its children come from low-income families, or below that with a state waiver. It's a program designation, and the low-income count it uses is a different measure from free-and-reduced lunch.
Expectations start low and get beaten. One Texas school leader went into her first Apex year without high hopes for her Title I campus. Now, she says, it brings in double what the school ever made from any other fundraiser.
One Las Vegas principal liked Apex enough to carry it from her old school to a low-income campus with no PTA at all, where office staff run everything. They cleared their goal.
At a Nevada school where essentially every student qualifies for free lunch, the fundraising chair raised roughly double what the cookie dough sale it replaced used to bring in. Her read on why it mattered went past the money. Not all of her students play soccer or basketball, and for two weeks, everybody was part of a team.
The most positive schools were also the most specific about what can go wrong. Take these seriously, because ignoring them is how a well-designed event still hurts somebody.
Volume and overstimulation are real. One Ohio kindergarten teacher flagged the pep rally as overwhelming for her autistic students. In Las Vegas, an assistant principal loved the energy of the lunchroom activities while some of her teachers found them too much. Ask for a quiet option early, while there's still time to plan it.
Timing can undo good design. Timing wrecked one Charlotte fundraiser. The PTA co-president ran hers right before Thanksgiving, in a year when families had lost SNAP benefits and immigration raids were happening locally. About 20% of the student population wasn't even at school. In Ohio, similar pressures pulled one school's total down noticeably. Check the local calendar and the local climate as well as the school calendar.
Registration prizes only go so far. The sharpest point in the whole study came from a PTO leader in North Carolina. Kids get a prize for registering, which is great, and then beyond that, for a lot of her students, it's just not going to happen. If your only equity measure is a participation trophy at the bottom of a tall prize ladder, the ladder is still the message.
Some schools should set smaller goals. One Las Vegas principal, whose school sits at about 75% free-and-reduced lunch, recommends the program without hesitation. She still cautions that schools at the very highest poverty levels should think carefully about goal-setting. A goal your community can't hit stops motivating anyone and turns into a public failure.
Parents may face barriers you can't see. Fingerprinting and badging requirements keep some parents off campus entirely, one Las Vegas principal pointed out. Families who aren't confident in academic settings often don't come at all. An event is one of the easiest, lowest-pressure reasons to get those parents through the door, so design the invitation with them in mind.
Run your plan against this list. It works whether you hire a partner or run it yourselves.
Kids want in. Ask any teacher who has watched a whole grade crowd the starting line. Whether every single kid gets to be in is a design choice, and it belongs to you.
Most of these fixes cost nothing at all. Prizes in backpacks. An any-amount-counts line on the flyer. A rotating challenge. A lights-on session. Experience rewards that cost the PTO nothing.
A few do carry real cost, and it's worth naming them. Shirts for every child, translation into every language your families read, and a second lower-volume session all take budget or staff time. For most schools, each of those costs less than one more prize tier.
Together they decide whether two weeks in the fall is the best part of a kid's year, or a public reminder of what their family doesn't have.
Thinking this through before the flyer goes home is the kind of work that keeps a campus feeling like it belongs to everyone. If you'd like a hand designing an event around these principles, talk to your local Apex team. That's the part we love most!
About the interviews: the practitioner stories come from 69 in-depth interviews with PTO and PTA leaders, principals and teachers, conducted by an independent researcher. Many of them run Apex programs, and we've said so wherever a story comes from an Apex school. Participants are described by role and region to protect their anonymity. Text inside quotation marks is verbatim from a transcript, and everything else is paraphrased from interview notes.