Comment by zachlatta
7 years ago
Parents co-sign contracts with students, but our contracts are designed to work elegantly with co-signers, different than similar programs. We're really just a modern fiscal sponsor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_sponsorship) designed for students that has a financial model that is still viable when project budgets are small (i.e. <$5K). We cut costs by writing software to do repetitive work, like producing basic financial reports, instead of hiring humans. You'd be shocked by some of the work fiscal sponsors do manually.
Student organizer teams assume liability for their events with our model, but we equip them with liability releases for attendees and have a relationship with a great insurance broker they can use to acquire insurance if needed.
You're right: some schools offer financial services, but they're often poorly managed due to lack of resources and are usually only available in well-off areas. Even then, most teachers and school administrators are already crushed by the burden of their workload and are hesitant to take on additional work, especially if it involves potential liability issues. There are probably students in this thread who have had that experience of being turned away—it's pretty common.
At my high school the teacher advisor of the school store also taught social studies.
In his class you could buy snacks, passes to get out of homework or pop quizzes, rights to sit on the couch, etc.
He also made us pick stocks and bring in cash so he could buy them for us and said we’d get the $$$ + any profits back when we graduated.
When we were seniors and asked for the cash from all those stock picks he acted like we didn’t know what we were talking about.
Years later he got fired for accidentally stabbing a student during a very realistic wagon train history unit.
This guy was really amazing. Before being a teacher apparently he owned a strip club in LA but claimed to be converted by evangelical christian protesters outside his club so he packed up and moved to Erie, PA to become a HS teacher.
This is the kinda guy you want handling your club finances. ;)
Sadly bad actors still exist everywhere, we haven't managed as a society/culture/race(as in the human race) figure out how to eradicate bad actors yet.
That said most public schools now are required by law to have a bunch of checks and balances and it's probably fairly rare that teachers are allowed to directly handle money much anymore. In my schools every employee has to go through a training every year about how the district handle's money, and your role in it (as a teacher/employee/etc) so it's at least now very clear what you are allowed and not allowed to do.
Ah, good to know, so you dump liability on the parent(s) heads, which is probably where it belongs anyway. I'm glad you aren't trying to do that yourself, especially remotely!
I'd be very surprised if a public school in the USA didn't offer such things, but I'm sure there is some school somewhere that exists just to prove me wrong! :). But I imagine it's a rare exception. Obviously charter schools and private schools are an entirely different mess, and I can't comment on them.
I know when I was a student (in a 80% people of color school) I had teachers sponsor my random events and things all the time, and it wasn't overly hard. You just have to have a good relationship with A teacher. I found my support in the "technology" dept, i.e. VICA and the other vocational groups. Even though nobody in that dept. did anything with computers, they didn't stop me from doing whatever I wanted. :)
Of course we never phrased the playing games event as playing games it was ... exploring 3d virtual worlds.. I believe we called it. :)
I happen to work in public education (90+% free/reduced lunch, so not a well off area) and I know the people that do the student finance stuff at the district level, they never say no, they just crunch the paperwork. I do know we sponsor all sorts of random stuff, including out of country travel for random things. So if a no is happening in "my" public schools, it must be at the local school/teacher level. But I agree I'm sure it happens. I'll have to go poke at them about that, see what I can do to help them get the local teachers/schools to say yes more often.
Public libraries are also a great way to get someone else to handle all the evil paperwork, but it's generally harder to get them to commit as they are always over-worked and not generally focused on school aged children, but if you happen to get lucky and can convince them your event/etc fits in with whatever their public outreach goals happen to be at the moment, they will do all the heavy lifting for you. Otherwise you can just rent out their space for your event (usually very cheaply) using something like what you do. Schools also rent space very cheaply, usually.