Though it started later in the school year than normal, high school students are selling fundraising raffle tickets for an opportunity to win two round-trip Alaska Airlines tickets. And this year, the students have an extra incentive.

“What will happen with this year’s fundraiser is that half of the money from each sale will go into the general sports and activities fund, and the other half will go into that student’s sports and activities fee for this year and the next school year,” Principal Greg Clark said.

“Hopefully, enough tickets can be sold so students can help alleviate some of that financial burden. It gives them a sense of ownership.”

Clark said this year’s fundraising raffle is a welcome return, as the district wasn’t able to do it last year.

“There were some complications from the year before that kept us from being able to have that fundraiser, but our new activities director Heather Armstrong has done a great job and got everything together and set up the way it needed to be for us to do this,” he said.

“Ideally, we would do this raffle throughout the school year. We weren’t able to start until recently. But I’m hopeful the students can benefit from this.”

As a parent, Clark said he understands the difficulty of making financial commitments for a student’s activity fees. A student competing in multiple sports will be looking at a fairly large sum of money after all expenses are totaled between activity fees and travel costs.

“Originally, (100% of) the money raised would just go into the general fund to cover things like equipment, paying for referees, coaches, etc.,” rather than sharing 50% with the student, he said.

He said the school isn’t making any profit from sporting events.

“When we host an event here, we’re doing well if we can break even,” he said. “When we hosted the wrestling tournament here in December, we actually may have lost money.”

He said coaches and parents have all expressed enthusiasm over the decision to split the fundraiser proceeds with students.

Tickets are $10 each and can be purchased from any high school student. Tickets will be sold until May 27.