PTA Fundraising and Spending; Let's Talk

A really informative article from The Atlantic on PTA fundraising.  Wonder if the new Board make-up, what with a former president of the SCPTSA and a former SCPTSA Board member, might have the courage to tackle this one.  But there is not just an "opportunity gap" but this:

A 2017 report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress found that of the roughly $425 million that America’s PTAs collectively raise each year, about a tenth is spent at schools attended by just one-tenth of 1 percent of the country’s students.

I also note that the district loves the money that flows into the district from PTAs because it certainly helps their bottom line.  Does the state fund education so that each teacher is not going into their own pocket to have the supplies/resources they need? No and neither does the district in turn.

SPS may have done nothing about PTA spending because there is so much money flowing to the district that it would be noticeable at JSCEE if it were curtailed.

 For example, the district likes it when PTAs do landscaping maintenance.  Bless the hard work of parents out there toiling but it then allows the district to hire fewer landscaping crew members.  The district likes it when PTAs replace carpeting because that's more money for other purposes.  (I recall when my kids were at Eckstein that the PTA paid for the library carpeting to be replaced - it had so many stains and tears - as well as making a commitment to pay for a new classroom's worth of desks each year.  I have no idea if the PTA kept that particular commitment up but it made my blood boil. That should be on the district.)

Different districts have different rules about PTAs’ activities and financial reporting, but few districts: 

• put caps on the amount of money that can be raised, 
• strictly regulate how PTAs spend their money, or 
• mandate that funds be spread around equally within a district.

Let's think about each one.

Caps on the amount of money that can be raised

Does that cover PTA funding or all giving funding?  I recall when my sons' were in elementary, the district had a neighborhood business partner program where a local business "adopted" a school.  I thought it a good idea - the business attached to our school was Key Bank which helped get kids started with savings accounts - but so much work for the district person to oversee.

It would be interesting to know how many schools get additional dollars beyond PTSA, where and how much.

But especially for high schools, the big money is in booster clubs, mostly for music and/or athletics. Roosevelt and Garfield do not have their stellar jazz bands because of largess from the district.  It has been parents, who for decades, have supported these groups.  But I don't think the district actually notates these dollars as they do for PTSA.

And, there are donations, especially for playground renewal and school supplies, again, that may or may not be counted.  I think playground renewal dollars do get counted but school supplies don't.

To get the point of this item, should a district cap how much money can be raised for any given school?  Good luck with that but if not, the chasm between schools that much greater especially if it is for staff or field trips or specialty items.  (I will say that I have never heard of any school, not a single one, who used money for field trips that did not have a scholarship fund for low-income kids.)

Strictly regulate how PTAs spend their money

I think this item is poorly phrased.  PTSA is a private entity that is allowed to operate on school grounds in association with the school/district.  No one can tell them how to spend their money.  But districts can regulate what they are allowed to spend dollars on within a school/district.

As has been stated many times, many other districts do not allow PTAs to buy staffing.  I personally agree with this.  And, within SPS, there are a couple of schools where principals - I'm thinking here of Ingraham's Martin Floe - who will not allow it.  (Floe's theory is that it is a lot of stress on a PTA to have to, every single year, raise the money for someone's salary and then, if for whatever reason they can't, he then has to scramble to find the money or let someone go.  FYI, several years back, Ingraham voted to go to a PTO and left the PTA.  I went to that meeting and it was an exercise in modeling civility and transparency.)

Also, there is sometimes tension within a PTA about what the money gets spent on.  If you come into a school and question the spending you may find parents who have been there a long time saying, "This has always been what we do."  Plus, I have seen more than one school where a principal has sway over the final decision which I personally think is wrong.  If membership wants to spend the money differently from the principal, that should be their call.

Mandate that funds be spread around equally within a district

In the article, it cites several different ideas.

For instance, in Seattle, some well-funded schools now voluntarily share a small portion (typically about 5 percent) of their PTA funds with nearby schools that have less money. Vivian Van Gelder, a former PTA president of a well-resourced public elementary school, was one of the parents who helped add a fund-sharing initiative to her school’s yearly PTA budget a few years ago. She said the change was initially met with some pushback from parents who were adamant that their donations stay at their children’s school, and noted that the original budget item passed by only a small margin last year. Van Gelder calls this arrangement “a start”—she’d like to see the system for educational funding overhauled more broadly.

I hadn't realized that those PTAs were giving dollars to "nearby schools."  There are a lot of Title One schools in the southend; who shares with them?

In thinking of that, I try to recall if the district ever did a story on their own about the sharing of PTA funds among schools. I don't think so.

Portland, Oregon, implemented a similar system, which has been around for a lot longer. In the mid-’90s, during a budgetary crisis, parents at many better-funded schools complemented PTAs by establishing school-specific fundraising foundations that could pay for additional staffing. Recognizing how this could lead to inequity, the Portland school district required that a central foundation serving under-resourced schools be created and that when the school-specific foundations spent money, they’d give an additional amount—roughly a third of whatever they spent—to that central foundation.

Sounds good but one parent points out a flaw:

First, if an expenditure falls outside the purview of the foundation—for instance, if money is spent on buying school supplies or building a science lab—no extra money needs to be set aside for other schools.

And second, parents’ contributions to schools don’t just come in the form of financial resources, but money is all that this policy addresses. “The scope of parent volunteerism [at these schools] is next-level—it’s like a second level of staff,” she told me. For instance, her daughter had been tutored for years by an engineer turned stay-at-home dad. While underfunded schools may also have parents who are willing to help, those parents’ involvement can be limited by less predictable work schedules and the different relationships they might have with public institutions.

Further, even if PTAs’ resources weren’t spread out so unevenly, their overall approach to helping schools doesn’t resonate with all parents. D. L. Mayfield, whose child goes to a school in Portland where 94 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, said that she and other parents feel “cast aside” by the “dominant cultur[al] model” of PTAs; they generally aren’t inspired to organize fundraising efforts to support a system that they don’t consider to be fair. “I think parent groups should focus less on raising money and more on advocating for systemic change,” she told me.

I would love to know what exactly that parent meant about "a dominant culture of PTAs."

That last sentence? That is exactly what state and national PTA are saying.  Less about fundraising, more about advocacy.

(As an aside, when I went to the WSPTSA website, I saw that they have a number of items of interest; I'll have to create a new post for all of those.) 

One of the more promising models for making PTAs a more equalizing force tries to account for the attitudes of parents at both well-funded and underfunded schools. It’s called the PTA Equity Project, and it’s run by two parents named Suni Kartha and Elisabeth Lindsay-Ryan in Evanston, Illinois, outside Chicago.

Three years ago, out of a shared concern about uneven PTA fundraising—Kartha’s children went to an under-resourced school, Lindsay-Ryan’s to a more affluent one—they gathered data on PTA funding at their district’s 18 elementary schools. They found that per-student parent-raised funding across their district ranged from $0 a student at some schools to almost $300 a student at others, and to remedy these imbalances, they began presenting some well-funded PTAs with their data and a suggested percentage that they could voluntarily divert to schools with smaller budgets.

In general, these suggestions have been received well, which likely has to do with their approach: “The start of the conversation is saying, ‘No one wants to punish anyone. No one is doing anything wrong,’” Kartha said. “Our goal is to help people broaden their lens and think about the district as a whole.” Kartha and Lindsay-Ryan noted that some parents from under-resourced schools said they felt heard as well, as they were able to share their perspective with other PTAs and ask for help advocating for reforms at the district level, as opposed to just having an opportunity to request financial support.

I gotta say, that "think of the district as a whole" is a big key to this whole issue.  The district gets so much out of the fundraising done at individual schools.  And, as you may have seen from the Moss-Adams report I posted, the numbers for the question of "do parents feel the district is responsive/listens to input" are very low.  That needs to change in order for parents to want to see the district big picture.

But this issue of parents understanding that big picture is yet another conversation that needs another post as there was a recent story at KNKX where I think the district is sending out messengers with talking points. 

This is one of the talking points:

The challenge, as Posey-Maddox sees it, is that most parents are reluctant to have “hard conversations” about the extent to which “the system enable[s] their child to hoard opportunities.” 

This is what needs to happen:

Ultimately, though, she favors fixes that would take the onus off individual parents to correct for an unfair system themselves. This is why she thinks it would be helpful to have more robust government funding of education overall.

And here's an interesting idea:

When parents choose a well-funded school or write a check to their school’s PTA, it can be hard for them to see all the schools that aren’t receiving any of their money. New York City is trying to make these differences between schools a bit more visible: About a year ago, it passed a measure that will require schools to publish how much money PTAs raise, alongside demographic data about the race, ethnicity, and English-learner status of students at each school, by the end of this year.

But again, if the schools are not require to report ALL money given to their school from ALL sources, just PTA fundraising won't tell the whole story.