I’m sure everyone has seen this logo on the tops of cereal boxes and other food and household products. I know I have been seeing it for years but certainly never did anything with them, just threw them away right along with the rest of the box. I either didn’t have kids or didn’t pay attention because they weren’t old enough for school. A list of all the participating products can be found in the All About Box Tops section of the Box Tops for Education website.
We recently have begun to consider school for our son and are faced with the current economic crunch which some call a recession. All we know is that prices are rising and it doesn’t seem like the money coming in is keeping up with all the increases. Along with that, it seems that not a day goes by that our local paper doesn’t talk about property taxes and that the current cuts (we’re in Indiana) are going to cause a severe hardship on school budgets. Because of all this, we began to pay attention to those little pink and yellow logos and cut them out. We save them in a little plastic bag in the cabinet.
Our local schools participates in the Box Tops for Education program. You can see if your school participates by clicking the How much has your school earned? button. You may have better luck typing the school name and state in as opposed to using the zip code search. The zip code search brought up over 300 listings and did not include the particular school my son will be going to but typing the school name and state found it. Once you select the local school, you will see some information regarding the school’s earnings to date. If you register for free on the site you will be able to get some additional info regarding their goals and the contact information for the local coordinator so you know where to drop off your collected box tops.
There are apparently three ways that schools can earn money through the Box Tops For Education program. The first is the one I mentioned above: clipping the box top logo and collecting them and turning them in. Each one is usually worth ten cents. The second is by shopping through the Box Tops Marketplace when you shop online. Shopping through the Marketplace will earn your school cash back based upon a certain percentage of the purchase amount. The percentage is different for each merchant but ranges roughly from one to six percent of your purchase amount. The third method for earning cash for your school is through the Box Tops Book Club. Order forms are distributed to the schools a couple of times a year.
Each of these three earning opportunities can earn each individual school up to $60,000 per year, that’s up to $20,000 per year for each of the three earning methods. Since 2002, our school has only earned a little over $11,000 which is only around 3% of what they could have earned. That is around $350,000 that could have been earned but wasn’t. I wonder how many of these box tops get tossed, as I used to do, without a second thought? How many thousands and tens of thousands of dollars are our local schools losing out on each year because people aren’t paying attention? How many of these same people are concerned about rising tax rates? How many are concerned about how lower budgets will affect their schools? How many people realize that they can actually help simply by taking out their scissors?
Everyone who pays property taxes, regardless of whether they have children, pays to support the schools. If the schools need more money to operate, everyone’s taxes will increase. Also, the quality of the education provided by the local schools should be important to everyone who lives in a community even if they do not have children in them. Education quality affects a community in many ways and it should remain of utmost importance. Everyone can help maintain education quality and keep taxes at bay simply by saving a small logo off products they buy every day and turning them in to the local coordinator.
The questions is, how do we get local communities and the individuals that live in them to realize not only the potential of the Box Tops for Education Program but also how simple it is for every household to participate?
About Kim
