As most of you know, my passion is education... begging people for money, not so much my thing... and yet as we launched into this annual drive campaign this year, I have to say that I took it on as a new challenge.  The economy is struggling and many of our families are feeling the pinch - keeping up with tuition alone seems like a major accomplishment.  It may seem paradoxical, but this reality is the very thing that got me inspired to step back and give this fundraising business the attention it deserves.  Our families are hurting and yet we cannot stop the progress we need to make in terms of increasing teacher and employee salaries.  We cannot put progress on hold while we wait for all to recover and get better.  Our students need for us to continue challenging ourselves as educators and we desperately do want to continue improving the campuses and bringing more technology into the classroom.  Without raising tuition, how are we to meet the needs of our LILA community?  The annual drive represents one way of doing this and a successful campaign helps us now by giving us the funds we need to install overhead projectors in all classrooms, and continue improvements on campus. More importantly, when we can get as close to 100% participation from all our families, we also start to build the track record we need to start approaching companies and foundations. Showing that our families support us increases our chances of getting them to do the same! This is turn could increase our fundraising sources, thereby decreasing our need to approach parents as often. 

If you have not already given... please... take a few minutes and donate.  If times are particularly tough, just give a symbolic amount so that we can count you in our participation statistics and don't be fooled, if all families gave even just a little, those funds would add up and get us that much closer to our goals!

We can all be very proud of what we have accomplished with this drive so far.   As of Tuesday the 26th of January,  the Annual Drive has raised $ 59,674.50 (chart and details below). If you were one of the donors who made this happen - THANK YOU!

However, as impressive as that figure is, that only represents 19% of our parent population and we need to get participation rates up!

Please click the link below... don't put it off!

https://payments.auctionpay.com/ver3/?id=w021242

If you prefer, you can also just add it to your Agreement at the time of enrollment next month and it would help us now and it could be tax-deductible for 2010.

Remember, every penny you give goes directly to YOUR campus!!!!

Please give what you can...  Your kids deserve it!