How to get more people here!

I agree that choir t-shirts would be a good idea, especially if we could coordinate all choir members to wear them prior to concerts. People would look at the shirts and say "What's with the shirt? You're in the choir?"... and then you could all say, "Yes, I'm in the choir. Come see our concert tonight; it's going to be cool." Well, maybe the conversation wouldn't go exactly like that, but letting your fellow MHS students know about the choir would be an excellent benefit of t-shirts.

However, there are a number of technicalities. First of all, holding a fund-raiser is a lot of work for whomever is organizing it. Tallys need to be kept on how much money comes in and how much candy goes out; supplies of product to be sold need to be guaranteed, and students need to be encouraged to sell. Additionally, think for a moment about each of your classmates. You know that there will be a few people that sell enough to pay for 15 t-shirts, and a few people that will sell one Kit-Kat that think that they're done making a contribution. There will be some people that will take the t-shirt home and you'll never see it again, while other folks might wear it weekly. It seems a bit unfair that a few people will pay for a lot of other people's t-shirts. To make a long story short , it seems like a large hassle to go through the process of organizing a fund-raiser for a relatively inexpensive item like a t-shirt.

Perhaps a different way to fund it would be that each student would pay for their own t-shirt. I doubt the price will go over $10 per shirt (although it will vary with size), so it should be within everyone's budget. Also, those who don't think they'd wear a choir shirt don't have to buy one. Perhaps some people could buy shirts for their families if they wanted to, providing some advertising for the choir outside of our school.

However, there is one more thing to consider. Designing a shirt and getting it printed takes quite a bit of effort, both from the choir and from the printers. Thus, we should be thinking about how many students will actually want t-shirts. If only 10 people want shirts, it really doesn't seem to be worth it. If 40-50 people are interested, making the t-shirts makes a lot more sense.

Just remember that asking for this means that you're asking someone (Mr. Emig, Mrs. Reinhart, a booster parent) to do a significant amount of organizational work at a time of the year when they're particularly busy. If it doesn't appear to be worthwhile, it's not going to happen. To try and help everyone get an idea as to how many people are interested, I've added a T-shirt survey here on the web site. If a large number of people appear to be interested, you'll have a much better chance of convincing someone to organize the printing and sales of t-shirts. (Please be honest and vote only once.)

One last point: Who will make the design? As Rebecca stated, "[The t-shirts should be] Not like huge tee-shirts, but like cute stylish ones that say MHS Choir or choralteens or something like that." Who can we ask to design them? Perhaps we could ask any student who's interested to submit a design, and then you could vote? Do you think a lot of students would make potential designs? ...just a thought...

Anyway, it's a good idea to make choir t-shirts, but we need to make sure a lot of students are interested and would wear them. So ask all the choir folks you think would be interested to vote in the survey, and we'll see what the results tell us.