[gafftaper]

Originally Posted by charcoaldabs

Gaff, I've been wondering about the highschool you taught at, and how you got that target grant. Was it a severely underfunded public school? I mean, it seems like there are plenty of other high school theatre programs out there that need money more than we do, not to say we don't need money. (It's all relative, isn't it?) Any thoughts on that? Did you call up the store manager, or what? How does that work?

I taught at one in the poorest school this side of southern California. Three housing projects made up about 70% of our students. About 90% of students were currently or had been in the past on welfare. It was a tough place to teach... but the grant money was EASY to get. It's a lot harder to get grants in a typical white bread middle class school... but you are in a much better position to do the tax deductable donation route. A local middle class school here... not a wealthy neighborhood, just very average. Does this huge fund raiser dinner and auction every year and they raise something in the neighborhood of $20,000 in one night. That is VERY possible with the right parent group running the theater booster club. Yes it has to be a theater booster club because that's the way the IRS rules work. The club has to be completely disconnected from the school and your teacher can't be in charge of it... must be a parent. They raise the tax deductable money and then choose to donate it to you.

On the other hand I was talking with the drama teacher from the 4th richest school in America last week... it's in L.A. and lots of famous people's kids go there. He just had one of those motorized dry cleaner racks installed in his costume room to make storage easy. I asked how much it costs and he said he had no idea, the school just paid for it. He also said that he had a student who got a Bentley as his 16th Birthday gift and was once offered $10,000 to cast a student as the lead in a show. Wow what a crazy place. Three drama teachers plus a paid tech director and a paid costumer. They do these HUGE productions and just pay for everything to be done. Wow.

Random side note he said that a high school down the road just did Miss Saigon. Oh they had the Helicopter alright, what they didn't have was a single Asian student in the whole cast. All these blond girls running around acting Vietnamese. What a nightmare.