CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Charlottesville school parents are banding together to form a citywide Parent Teacher Organization fund. One of the organizers, Annie Suttle, told Cville Right Now this effort pools together all the resources and contacts into more robust fundraising potential. It also evenly distributes resources throughout the city schools.

Suttle said the idea originally came up in 2020, but was derailed by the pandemic. At that point, the parents were finding a dramatic fundraising disparity between organizations, with “some PTOs were raising up to $20,000 a year and other were more at the $5,000 a year mark.”

“I guess that had sort of been maybe a known thing, you know quietly spoken about, maybe a little bit shameful,” she said. “But at that point, we were like, ‘This is not okay, we need to deal with this.”

That year, they pooled PTO money together to provide student supplies they needed to learn at home, then transfer back to the classrooms. She said that sort of fizzled out and things went back to the way they were.

“Within the last year or two, those conversations restarted and we realized that was still happening, that there was still this massive discrepancy where if one school has $15,000 extra to dedicate to things like field trips, author visits, teacher grants for classroom projects, and staff appreciation,” she said. “That is a huge different between what one school’s teachers and students are experiencing and what others get.”

Suttle said, “We’re in this same small community and that feels particularly egregious where someone just down the street from you is having a pretty different experience and then you’re all going to go to middle school and high school together.”

“So we all got together and decided we needed to fix it, to do something about it, and here we are with the citywide Charlottesville PTO Fund.”

She says the pooled organization can generate more funding opportunities than they can access as separate entities.

The City-wide PTO Fund will host a fundraiser with live music at Random Row Brewery on Thursday, October 23. A portion of all proceeds 4-10pm will go to the Fund, and there will be live music and raffle prizes.

All information and donations are found by clicking here.