My coworkers have kids in public school, and they do candy fund raisers, cheese cake, and cookie dough fund raisers. They usually give the kids the booklets to pass around about 4 weeks in advanced. They let you know when the money is due and you can pay by check or cash. It's usually due in full when they hand in the orders. Students are not required to do fund raisers in public school. They usually do them for trips or the band.
My son goes to catholic school. We've had candy, pizza, and t-shirt fund raisers in the past and it worked just like the public school. The students weren't required to do those types of fund raisers. I liked the pizza and t-shirt fund raisers the best, because the pizza could be frozen and the t-shirts don't pack on the pounds like that annoying candy. Don't like candles either. We do have a required fund raiser called "The Winner's Circle." It's a raffle with big prizes like cruises, vacations, TVs, gift cards, cash, etc. We have a choice to sell $600 worth of tickets or forgo the selling and pay the school $500 instead. We sell them, because we figure that way we have a chance of winning something. Didn't win anything until last year. We won a vacation and gave it to one of the people that buy a ticket from us every year. We also won a Broadway music CDs with t-shirts, a massage, and a $25 Polo gift card. (That was our lucky year.) The tickets used to be $100/ticket. We talked the diocese into reducing the price of the tickets to make them easier to sell. Now they are $50/ticket. Yes, we dread the raffle ticket selling due to the amount we have to sell; but got to follow the rules to keep our son there. Everyone knows about having to sell the tickets, because you have to sign a form whether you are participating or not and how much you have to sell or pay if not participating; so nothing hidden.