Comment by zie

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.