Schools raising money for organizations outside of their suffering communities

This is a hot topic in my community currently.

Many high schools in the area have spirit weeks to raise money for a foundation. The foundation is always a large foundation that is not local to our area, and sometimes it is a for profit foundation. It is usually related to cancer research, humane society, wigs for kids, etc.

The average number that each high school raises to donate to their foundation of choice is $114,000 within that week. It is raised through bake sales, shirts, dares, classroom funny activities, etc.

We also currently have over 1,950 homeless students. Their resources are not very good. I work with them often and it’s challenging in our area to get them the help they need as financially most of our local organizations just don’t have everything they need to help them, despite our area being so wealthy. Multiple news outlets have described the problem as only getting worse and I can believe it judging by the statistics that were taken on them this past spring.

Many parents are taking issue with the fact that schools are raising such large amounts of money for nonlocal organizations when so many of our own students don’t have homes, stable daily meals, clothing, access to school supplies, etc as it is. Many of these students get free lunch, but not breakfast or dinner, and most schools don’t have showers for them to use, so their hygiene suffers often, leading to ridicule from other students. Our counselors have said they are running out of resources. Many parents believe the $114,000 avg that every school makes should largely go toward helping these students get back on their feet.

The schools tend to solely focus and stress on the spirit weeks but occasionally have a canned food drive for the homeless in general. There aren’t any other broad efforts to help the homeless students within the schools themselves. It is a well known problem, but it is one that most people tend to ignore or say “there’s not much we can do”. Some parents believe this is because homeless children aren’t as “glamorous/fun” of an issue to raise money for compared to animals and such.

With so many homeless students within their own school system, should schools start redesigning their spirit week choices of organization to first help out the people within their own community, or is it ok that they are picking an outside organization to support?