How to get help. I used to be a Drama teacher in a poorly funded urban school. These are two of my most successful tricks to get money.
1) Everyone has a budget which vaporizes at the end of the school year and resets the following year. I would make a shopping list on it have everything from $10 items to $10,000 items and start talking to department heads, the
book keeper, and administration to find out if anyone is not going to spend all of their money. Often people will leave a couple hundred dollars here and there unspent. That's a gold mine of small purchases. Sometimes there will be a couple thousand dollars left unspent. Get the
book keeper and an administrator on your side and be ready to spend anything from $20 to $2000 at a moment's notice. This end the year money often has to be spent fast, right at the deadline. The
book keeper would say, "I've got $400 for you but I need you to spend it by the time I go home today" and I would grab my list and start shopping.
2) Do the following math... For every
fixture in your inventory (dead or alive) take the cost of buying a new lamp and divide it by the average life of that lamp. Now total them all up. Round up another buck or two to take into account the cost of
gel, wear on lamp sockets and other repairs. Now you have the hidden cost per hour of turning all the lights on. You'll probably find that it's $5-$10 per hour. Every assembly, community user, class that wants to use the theater for a special event is costing this much, PTA meeting, and no one is paying for it. It doesn't sound like much, but over time you end up with a stack of dead fixtures that will cost $1000 to repair. If you want to get really nuts, take the next step and figure out how many hours a year those lights are on and who is using them. Now, take your magic number and educate people about it. Show off the stack of lights you have that all need lamps. Explain that you can't just buy a 99 cent
bulb at home depot, your lamps cost $15-$20 each. I was able to get student government to chip in $300 a year from their budget for lamps. I also got a $10 per hour charge added to all rentals as well.
Good luck!