Free Money For Your School
Last week, I got a $50 JC Penny gift card in the mail. It came from Box Tops for Education Marketplace Holiday Shopping Review, with no strings attached. I knew about Box Tops for Education, because I’ve seen the little labels on cereal boxes, and my MIL collects them for the school where she used to teach. But that’s about as far as my knowledge of the program went. Turns out that not only can you clip the tops from food packages, but there’s a whole slew of online retailers where you can shop and a portion of what you spend is given to the school of your choice.
I’m not particularly computer-savvy. It took me more than a year to figure out how to put pictures into my blog posts. But I can happily report that the experience of shopping on the Box Tops Marketplace was easy even for me. All you have to do is go to the Box Tops for Education website, and sign up. Click on the ‘sign up now’ link in the upper right corner, and it will prompt you to find your school (we chose the school near our house where our son will eventually go) and your login info. Then just click on the Marketplace tab, and you’ll see a very extensive list of retailers where you can shop online and have a portion of what you spend donated to your school.
In my case, I went to JC Penny, since I had the gift card. But there are tons of other stores. If you do much of any online shopping at all, you’ll probably find a store that you already frequent on the list. You still pay the same amount for your purchases, and there are no extra surcharges or hoops to jump through. You just get to the store’s website via the Box Tops site, and the donation is credited automatically. So if you’re a fan of online shopping, or planning to do your holiday shopping on the internet, you might as well take a few minutes to sign up at the Box Tops site and get money for your school while you’re at it.
So what did I buy? Well, let me preface this with a boring shopper alert. I got a new cotton and linen shower curtain to replace the one we’ve had in our guest bathroom for years. It was on a clearance sale for $20. And then I ended up buying some boxers for my husband. After shipping and tax, my total came to $48.85 – completely covered by my gift card. I warned you that it would be boring. When I’m shopping (unless I’m in a thrift store or an organic food store) I’m all about practical. A friend gave me a gift card to Target for my birthday this year, and I used it to buy Dr. Bronners soap and some underwear.
Maybe if all of us do our online shopping via the Box Tops website, our schools won’t have to have as many fundraisers that involve sending small children out to knock on doors and guilt people into buying candy bars. So if you’ve got shopping to do, I would encourage you to check out the site and see if the store you’re planning to visit is included in the Box Tops Marketplace. I promise that the process is easy – if I can do it, so can you.
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