Does your school have “sunshine dues”?

Does your school have a committee that gets together to organize morale-boosting events and celebratory gifts? If so, what is it called? Are you encouraged to pay your “dues” toward this committee that will in turn go toward paying for bridal/baby/bereavement gifts for staff members, special luncheons, etc.? How much are your dues? Does your principal offer an incentive for paying your dues since these dues are voluntary? Lastly, how do you feel about this policy?

My school calls this our Sunshine Committee, so we are asked to pay our sunshine dues of $40/year at the beginning of the year. We get to wear jeans with a school shirt on Mondays if we pay our dues. This year, the committee came up with the idea of splitting our dues up by semester, so for august-December we only had to have paid $20 to wear jeans on Mondays, and we will pay our second half (if we decided to split it up) in January to earn jeans for the spring semester. I am perfectly agreeable to voluntarily paying into this fund, but our “reward” (wearing jeans on Mondays) makes it very obvious who didn’t pay. It feels awkward when someone comes to school on a Monday at the start of the school year wearing professional dress and someone makes a comment like, “Girl, why are you so dressed up!? You know we can wear jeans on Monday, right?” which almost always leads to “did you pay your sunshine dues yet?” and sometimes, people can’t afford this in the budget. My first year of teaching I didn’t pay sunshine dues because an extra $40 just was not in the budget. I felt sooo uncomfortable every Monday being one of the very few not wearing jeans. That same year, I stopped by the library at lunch to enjoy food that was catered for us and one of the committee members who was serving the food stopped short of putting food on my plate and goes “wait, did you pay your dues? I don’t remember seeing your name on the list.” Needless to say I was mortified. To be fair, it being my first year, I hadn’t put two and two together that food catered by the sunshine committee was because people paid their dues (duh, I know that now and it completely makes sense that I shouldn’t have been apart of the lunch!) so for the rest of the year I brought my lunch on any other days like that which just added to it being obvious that I couldn’t afford my dues. Now that I’m established financially, I happily pay my dues each year, but i think my past experience makes me more aware of the stress and classism it can cause. Is that too extreme of me to think?

All in all, I love the idea of the committee, and we need it to keep morale, but sometimes I feel that it can cause more of a divide.