Our nonprofit uses print and direct mail to help accomplish its mission by printing Newsletters and making copies of flyers to post around the school and to hand out to the parents. Secondly, when we have fundraisers we need to print and make copies for the students to send home to their parents, because not every parent is tech savvy enough to log into a Social Media page and follow us in order to be up to date with the current events, so we always have to have more than one way of getting the information to the parents. Our beginning of the year budget has depleted tremendously as we have spent over a thousand dollars on printing and making copies to deliver to new Parents at our Orientations. We are a very active and engaging PTA, and our Parents are very supportive for the most part, but our school population is between 900 to 1,000 students from grades Pre-k to 6th, therefore a large group of our parents do not get notices sent home from the PTA. When our parents realizes that they aren't getting notified of an event that took place, they get discouraged from becoming a member of the PTA, even though we try to explain to them that we post updates on our Social Media, but they don't all have Social Medias.

It is frustrating for us at times because our main mission for this school year, is to increase our Parent and School Engagement, but due to this problem of not having the funds to print the large number of copies that we need, we often fall short on Parental Involvement, and as a result the students miss out on informative Assemblies, Fund Raisers, Parties, Trips, Spirit Weeks, Cancer Awareness Donations etc. Families miss out on PTA Meetings, where we discuss important things like budgets, raffle prizes, and guest speakers due to the PTA not being able to print over 900 copies of notices to send home. In the past, our old PTA Board had access to a large number of copies throughout the school year, but due to budget cuts from the School District, the Principal is no longer allowing the PTA to make copies or do any form of printing. The children at the school work and do homework on iPads that are sent home with them daily, therefore copies in the main office is no longer available. That is the reason why, I began to make copies at our local print shop in the neighborhood, but it has unfortunately cost us too much. Each month until the end of the school year, June, we have a large amount of notices, flyers, family information pamphlets, and monthly newsletters that need to be sent home. With our tight budget, myself and the rest of my PTA Executive Board, have no idea, how we will be able to get this information out to so many parents that are a part of this large school of nearly 1,000 students. We have reached out to other local print shops, but due to the volume of printing needed, we can still rack up thousands of dollars each month in printing costs.