Play money
In Van Nuys, couples wander through a faux Italian villa, tasting $500 bottles of Merlot and learning much about olive oil. In Silver Lake, folks at a dinner dance bid for walk-on roles on “Friends” and “ER,” for trips to Jamaica and New York. In Los Feliz, women peruse racks of designer clothes and handbags, writing checks amid the clatter of hangers and the bleat of cell phones.
For those who have not yet received a personal invite, there’s a new notation on the collective social calendar -- the preschool fund-raiser.
With spring fairs and winter galas, sample sales, wine tastings, rock concerts and film screenings, more and more preschools are moving away from the traditional series of smaller revenue-generators -- your candy sales, your gift-wrap drives -- in favor of one or two blowout events. What with the inevitable presence of celebrity parents at many schools and the increasing business acumen of the volunteer-mommy base, these fetes have become more and more glamorous and profitable.
Barbara Davis probably doesn’t have to worry about it cutting in on the Carousel of Hope, but a dinner dance at the L.A. Athletic Club and a silent auction complete with four-color catalog are a far cry from hauling cookie dough door to door.
“We can do this kind of thing in this town,” says Pamela Ezell, a mother of two who has helped put together the celebrity-studded dinner-dance and silent auction for All Children Great and Small in Los Feliz. “My sister lives in New Jersey, and her school has a silent auction, but they also have to sell gift wrap and stuff, which, fortunately, I have not had to do.”
“I cannot get behind Tupperware,” says Michele Keeler, who has done fund-raising for two schools now. “It takes too much time and means bugging my friends when they are bugged beyond bug.”
But she will, and has, spent hours, months of hours, on the phone begging for items for a silent auction or a sample sale. Parents unwilling to spend their time organizing a rummage sale that might gross $500 will dedicate three months of their lives to a glitzier event that will bring in anywhere from $8,000 to $30,000.
At many schools, most fund-raising dollars come from direct-appeal campaigns -- parents are expected, or required, to make donations of a certain amount. But despite tuitions that range from $5,000 to $12,000 a year, it is the rare preschool that doesn’t have at least one other fund-raiser a year. Schools use the money in different ways -- on supplies or field trips, scholarships or teacher bonuses. Likewise, the level of parental involvement varies. Some schools, especially cooperatives, require a certain number of hours served; others rely on volunteers.
For six hours on a recent breezy Saturday, Joanna Harper, whose children attend the cooperative L.A. Family School in Silver Lake, transformed her Los Feliz home into a boutique. The frontyard bloomed with jewelry, wooden toys and a tent of richly hued rugs; inside, there was designer clothing upstairs, downstairs and in my lady’s chamber. The school received 15% of the designers’ sales, which translated to about $5,500.
“JCC, Hilltop, the Oaks, Children’s Community,” says Harper, listing many of the local preschools in the area, “they’re all doing sample sales. Everyone likes them. The designers need to sell stuff; everyone needs to buy stuff.”
Other area schools have branched out into money-raising events usually reserved for the likes of Farm Aid. One has held concerts at the Silver Lake club Spaceland. Another had a gala premiere for a movie starring Elvira, a school parent.
The celebrity-parent factor has long affected the sort of fund-raisers certain schools have held. In 1949, when the newly opened Westland School in Brentwood came up short, the director turned to Charlie Chaplin, whose daughter was one of the school’s first students. He organized a benefit screening of “City Lights” and invited a bunch of his friends, including the Marx Brothers.
More than 50 years later, many schools still count on industry types to raise the glitz factor of their events. “We have parents who have great jobs and great connections,” says Ezell, who has worked for several years on the silent auction at All Children Great and Small, which raises from $25,000 to $30,000 annually. “Anthony Edwards, for example, is a very involved alum parent, and his wife, who runs Stila [Cosmetics], has been very generous.”
This year, in addition to the silent auction, there was a raffle with trips to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and five-star hotels in Hawaii as prizes (both with airfare included). “We have producers who shoot movies there,” says Ezell, “and house the entire cast and crew. So when they call asking for a few free nights, the hotels are pretty happy to say yes.”
For Ezell, this kind of event is the only thing that makes sense for a preschool. “It’s inappropriate for kids this age to go door-to-door, and parents don’t have any time,” she says.
For almost a decade, the Early Years Preschool in Santa Monica has kept its main fund-raising confined to two events a year -- a garage sale and a dinner-dance with silent auction. Last year’s dance was held at Shutters, and one of the fathers, a “well-known songwriter,” got some of his music industry buddies to play. “It’s gotten a little fancy,” says co-director Tama Taub. The tickets were $80 a pop, which, she says, is a bit of a problem. “Not everyone can afford that. We’re struggling a little with the event.”
Other schools say their fund-raising techniques remain as they ever were. The director of the Center for Early Education in West Hollywood says the school’s annual auction and dinner-dance haven’t changed much in the last 16 years. Of course, the auction has included such items as a home-cooked meal for 16 from Wolfgang Puck and a round of golf with Michael Jordan. So it may simply be a question of smaller schools playing catch-up.
Five years ago, when Keeler enrolled her first child at L.A. Family School, she was drafted into helping with the silent auction, which typically brought in about $7,000. She started calling every company she could think of -- airlines, hotels, department stores, boutiques, clothing designers -- and asking for donated items. “I saw Richard Tyler one day and thought, ‘We should have a Richard Tyler dress.’ So I called and they were so nice, they donated a $3,500 dress.”
Her first auction made $20,000.
When her children began attending Children’s Community School in Van Nuys, Keeler helped organize the main fund-raiser, a wine tasting that came to include seminars on olive oil and raw vegetables, separate stations for different varieties of wine and a huge silent auction. Keeler called a friend who worked in the props department of Universal Studios and transformed the school parking lot into an Italian villa. The event raised close to $25,000.
“I figured if we were going to do it,” Keeler says, “we should do it right.”
Although that sentiment has been shared by zealous volunteering moms throughout the ages, the definition of “right” has clearly changed. Because the moms have changed. And, with a few exceptions, it is still mostly the moms who are making the calls and forming the committees. But now many are in the midst of high-powered careers, and even those who have taken a sabbatical have work experience that led them away from the bake-sale table.
“We have a lot of professional women who may not be working at this moment but who are used to running things a certain way,” Ezell says. “They have time and talent, but they aren’t interested in using it to make $250 when they could make $25,000.”
Not surprisingly, the proliferation of the high-end silent auction has created an air of competition. Parents rattle off the school with the slickest auction catalog or the highest bidding, and many find themselves vying for donors. Taub at Early Years says they start soliciting much earlier these days because so many restaurants and businesses get requests from so many schools. “Oh, they just groan now,” Harper says. “So you have to keep finding new sources.”
Many larger private schools have hired staff dedicated solely to fund-raising projects. St. James Episcopal School in Mid-Wilshire recently hired Theresa Maday as its development director. Maday immediately upgraded the venue and the merchandise for the school’s spring dinner and silent auction -- last year’s event netted $110,000, compared with $40,000 in past years.
The auction catalog alone, which is circulated a week or so before the event, is one of those mentioned by parents at other schools. “Our catalog is a big deal,” Maday says. “We have one mom who has been writing it so it’s very funny, and people look forward to getting it.”
Maday doesn’t think anything St. James does in the fund-raising department differs from what most private schools do. “Most schools have been forced to put a development director on board because if you have a tuition like ours [$9,500 a year], that’s bargain-basement prices, so you need to make ends meet with fund-raising.”
Still, she says, things haven’t changed completely. At St. James, as at every other school with a silent auction, the most popular and profitable items are those made by the children or involving the teachers.
“Staff members will take a group of kids to the movies or to lunch at Subway,” Maday says. “You see the kids out to lunch with their teachers, and they are just in heaven.”
And making a child principal for the day can go for two grand, she says, but quickly adds, “which is nothing -- at other schools, that alone will go for $10,000, $15,000.”
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