California Lottery officials announced a stellar year with estimated sales for Fiscal Year (FY) 2003-04 over $2.9 billion, representing the highest sales since the commencement of the Lottery in 1985.
Also celebrating are the Lottery players who won more than $1.5 billion in prizes, and retailers who earned $205 million in commissions and bonuses. Most importantly, schools benefit with more than $1.090 billion being transferred to public schools, including $15 million (the cash value) from an unclaimed SuperLOTTO(R) Plus jackpot of $28.5 million. "This marks the fourth consecutive year the California Lottery has transferred over a billion dollars to public education and further demonstrates its commitment to achieving the public's mandate of providing supplemental funding to education," said Dennis Sequeira, Interim Director, California Lottery.
"The partnership with Lottery employees, retailers, players, and business associates helped the Lottery to achieve Scratchers(R) sales of over $1.338 billion, increasing the previous year's sales by over $127 million. Also, contributing to the record-breaking sales was the $3 'Bingo' game (launched in May 2003 and available through FY 2003-04) and the $5 'Red, Hot & Blue 7's' game which yielded $78 million in its initial five weeks of sales." These tremendous sales results provide additional evidence of how the Lottery could increase sales and contributions to public education if legislation allowed it to increase the prize payout in its games. In addition to increasing sales, the Lottery implemented the world's largest and most complex gaming system with more than 80,000 pieces of equipment installed in over 18,000 Lottery retailer locations.
Ultimately, estimated revenues from the Lottery generated almost $126 per pupil, supporting over 8.3 million students in California's public schools. Lottery funds also continue to support other areas of public education including: K-12, community colleges, the University of California, the California State University, adult education, charter schools and even the California Youth Authority receives Lottery funds. "The California Lottery was never intended to be the panacea for education; yet, its funding has made a positive difference in the lives of many of California's students," said Jack O'Connell, State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Excuse me, I am a disgruntled Californian, they claim all of the money that they have invested into the schools and yet they are still crying that they don't have enough money to take care of them (the schools and children), California lottery is ripping people off here, it's fixed. They spent all this money on a lottery picking machine that does a good job of picking the numbers where they want the people to win. The bottom line is this, they are interested in helping the schools or there wouldn't be such a big problem in the schools, i.e. books, staff, and facilities. The Mega Millions would be nice, but it would just help to make a bad situation here worse.
Its the same situation here is Texas. Just the other day there were school on the news where the ceilings were caving in and there was mold in the schools....but if you go the the Texas lottery website they claim that they have transfered about 11billion to schools since Texas started the lottery. They must be spending all that money on those fabulous school lunches!
With those kinds of sales t
Excuse me, I am a disgruntled Californian, they claim all of the money that they have invested into the schools and yet they are still crying that they don't have enough money to take care of them (the schools and children), California lottery is ripping people off here, it's fixed. They spent all this money on a lottery picking machine that does a good job of picking the numbers where they want the people to win. The bottom line is this, they are interested in helping the schools or there wouldn't be such a big problem in the schools, i.e. books, staff, and facilities. The Mega Millions would be nice, but it would just help to make a bad situation here worse.
Its the same situation here is Texas. Just the other day there were school on the news where the ceilings were caving in and there was mold in the schools....but if you go the the Texas lottery website they claim that they have transfered about 11billion to schools since Texas started the lottery. They must be spending all that money on those fabulous school lunches!
when lotteries say the proceeds are going toward education, they usually mean scholarships, but sometimes they send the money elsewhere.
That's what NY says about lottery proceeds.