Heads Up on Fundraising Changes Coming to Seattle Schools
Just a heads up.
The Board is having two Audit & Finance Committee meetings this week (one is tomorrow). Interestingly, the key topic are two policies around Sexual Harassment/Assault; one policy for students and one for employees. I will have a separate post on this topic as it's a huge one.
As usual, I requested the documentation for each meeting (you have to do that, otherwise all you see is an agenda with topics). Buried deep in the documentation for the second meeting is this memo from A&F chair, Chandra Hampson. (See below.)
To be clear, I believe this will affect not just PTA fundraising but any outside gifts like from booster clubs.
I also see that there are there grand phrases like "the values and vision of the community" and "acceptance of resources should be tied to demonstrated ability to impact student outcomes." Neither is really defined and that's troubling. I see no mention of any public engagement but I'm sure that when many, many PTAs and others see that their fundraising efforts and outcomes will be guided by a (somewhat) unseen hand of the Board and the Superintendent, well, that might become a loud discussion.
We all know Hampson hates any kind of real discussion so this could get interesting. And I wonder if this would include what the Alliance for Education does. And, PTA fundraising has always been a bee in Hampson's bonnet so it's not a surprise that it's happening.
To: Audit & Finance Committee
From: Chandra Hampson, Chair of A&F Committee Re: Policy revisions to include in A&F Workplan Date: 3.21.22
Purpose
As part of Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG) implementation, the policies that guide district funding structures need to be aligned with the outcomes we are seeking to achieve for students. The Audit & Finance committee will be reviewing and revising policies to align with SOFG best practices, Board adopted Goals and Guardrails, and the District’s Theory of Action to ensure that the district is generating and distributing resources in a way that will positively and equitably impact students. This is also an opportunity to address the inequities in fundraising structures and align district acceptance of gifts and grants with district goals for student outcomes.
Discussion
The Audit & Finance (A&F) committee will review and revise the following School Board Policies:
6010, School Funding Model
6102, Fundraising
6114, Gifts, Grants, Donations, and Fundraising Proceeds
3520, Student Fees, Charges, Fines, Restitution and Damage Deposits (in partnership with
SSC&I)
3530, Fundraising Activities Involving Students (in partnership with SSC&I)
In the review and revision of these policies, the A&F Committee will focus on:
Aligning criteria and guidance with the vision and values of the community, as represented by the Goals and Guardrails.
Placing decision making authority with the Superintendent to operationalize the guidance provided by the Goals, Guardrails, and Theory of Action in regards to distribution, fundraising, and acceptance of resources.
Providing guidance that decisions about distribution, fundraising, and acceptance of resources should be tied to demonstrated ability to impact student outcomes.
Providing guidance to the Superintendent to address inequities in fundraising and access to resources across schools.
Next Steps
The A&F committee will need to determine the timing and sequence of the policy review and revision for the committee workplan. Staff recommendation is to begin with 6010 School Funding Model and 6114 Gifts, Grants, Donations, and Fundraising Proceeds, then address 6102 Fundraising, 3520 Student Fees, Charges, Fines, Restitution and Damage Deposits, and 3530 Fundraising Activities Involving Students together.
The A&F committee may also wish to provide additional guidance to committee staff on policy revisions and process.
Comments
Save SPS
As far as I can tell, when this School Board talks about "Student Outcomes Focused Governance", it is not meant to imply that they are a Governing body that is Focused on Student Outcomes. (this is what I assumed at first)
Instead, I believe it is to affirm that they have Focused their Governing on just three Student Outcomes. These are the goals related to the Seattle Excellence Plan (increased literacy for Black boys, increased math proficiency for Black boys, and increasing the number of Black boys who both graduate and take one advanced course).
Am I right about how to interpret the SOFG title? Would be curious if others have been led to the same conclusion.
Approximately 10 years ago, the PTA stopped paying for elementary school counselors. The idea was to force the state and district to fund counselors; it never happened.
Thanks for reading materials, Melissa. There was nothing on the Audit and Finance Agenda that indicated Hampson was going after PTA funding.
The stupidity of the equity circus is appalling.
Appaling because actual students, the most vulnerable and the furthest from educational justice, are ALWAYS hurt the most with these idiotic policies.
Parents will always want to do for their kids. Spending their time, energy, cash, on their children. It is true that some families have lots while many have none. But the solution to that is not to take away, but, to add in.
Families at West woodland will give their kids private math tutoring or kitchen table math if you take away good curriculum. But, families who cannot provide either will have kids that suffer.
At Jane Addams, ALL kids were encouraged to join music (band, choir, orchestra) and shown how much fun it was and told they would be supplied an instrument and there would never be any costs; that all would attend the retreats and competitions with all costs covered if the families couldn't pay for it. It was great. Then the principal decided going away was too inequitable, so the trips got killed. Families with means still vacation with the kids, but, the kids whose families could never afford to take time off work, didn't own a car, couldn't afford to go camping or visit the coast, those kids' lives just got smaller.
Etc.
Banning money going into the schools will not ban money going into the schools. If you can't have a 501C3 booster hiring a bus, perhaps a parent will step forward and pay for the bus out of pocket. It happens. There are always work-arounds.
I really do not have a problem with a school community raising funds to do their playground, or buy books for the library, or get lights for the theaters, or make a science field trip possible for all the kids.
If policy blocks this happening on a systemic scale, all that it means is that children of families who are in a position to take their kids to enriching activities will continue to do so and those kids alone will continue to benefit. In contrast, the kids in the schools who don't have such families will simply do without. The schools cannot even provide appropriate levels of janitorial services for the buildings, thinking they are going to step in with 'extras' that the PTA or booster clubs provide is deluded.
Certain taxes just give birth to black markets. Driving economic activity into a shadowy underground, where no one sees the totality of it or can address the legitimate concerns of it.
PTA, booster, parent funding should be put in the context of the overall ed budget: it truly is a drop in the bucket. One school my kids went to got $8K/student, the one next door got $17K/student. Donor money, while attracting all the attention, is never going to match the heft of government funding. And, frankly, the real problem is what isn't happening in the schools, not the distribution of $.
blue bus
Thankfully, the parent spoke up and told Hampson that the district has dedicated $1M per year for playgrounds. I personally think it is wonderful that community care about special ed students and had the capacity to create an accessible space for these kids. The district could divert the $1M playground funds to low income schools.
Children’s Tears
What blue bus said above should be obvious to everyone -- if you make it impossible for families with privilege and means to get their kids' needs met in the public system, they will simply leave the public system.
I have to believe at this point that is exactly what Chandra and Liza want: to drive parents who have any kind of privilege or means out of SPS entirely. We know that some of their buddies at the SCPTSA are now very pro-charter. It stands to reason Chandra and Liza are now pro-charter as well, and working to create a market for charter schools and privatization among north Seattle parents by making the public schools as bad as possible.
somebody new
Rankin and Hersey will go along with anything Hampson has to offer. Sad.
In the meantime, Hersey has TWO high schools without principals. What do you hear from Hersey about the principal issue? Nothing. He is more concerned with disallowing public comments.
Even today, if you look at the budget spreadsheets for most schools and the district, PTA funding is truly small change in the context of the $1.4 billion district budget, and it pales compared to funding from other nonprofits that are also financially contributing to the district. PTA's have typically back-filled district-funded 0.5 FTE librarians, art/music, PE and counselors as 1.0 FTE or more. In rare cases, PTA's have funded teacher positions to prevent a mid-year layoff, which is an unusually common practice in Seattle because of how we budget staffing levels and very harmful to children.
I'm open to the policy discussion of whether that kind of funding should be occurring and what should occur instead. However, I have two points. First, if we rationalize and harmonize how donations are handled across the landscape, PTA's should be subject to the same rules that apply to the Gates Foundation and every other donor big and small to the schools. Also, if PTA funding is channeled through the Alliance, then other donors' money should too. Second, if we take PTA funding off the table to back-fill positions at higher-income schools, then the Olchefske model that enhances district funding to lower-income has to be eliminated, and each school should use the same baseline funding model. I consider these as interlinked and mutually exclusive: either we have an equal baseline at each school, or we allow back-filling.
A third consideration is that donations made to PTA's are tax-deductible, which incentivizes giving by the rich, but contributions made directly to the schools are not usually tax-deductible, at least by individual donors. If we want to continue getting donations but not use PTA's, we need another charitable entity to handle donations or a change to the tax code, otherwise the money from a lot of individual donors will dry up precisely when we need that support most.
Budget
This has to be by design. Chandra and Liza have to be deliberately laying the groundwork for privatization of our schools.
I don't think most parents want to see PTA funding ended or limited so as to be unable to provide basic needs in schools, there is likely wide support for doing something like Portland has done where a percentage of the money raised is shared with the schools whose PTAs can't raise that money. But for the reasons Budget mentioned, PTA fundraising is a better option for everyone than cutting it off entirely or having it go through some other method.
High Stick
- on playgrounds. This used to be an issue because the district would not keep up playgrounds, even terrible ones. Many PTAs raised money plus applied for matching city grants to pay and the district was MORE than happy to get this done on someone else's dime.
Thank Director Leslie Harris for finally saying that BEX and BTA capital dollars should be available every round so that more schools can get their playgrounds updated. I think this is from at least 4 years back.
- As for PTA funding versus Title One. Apples and oranges because 1) yes, Title One money is naturally a lot more than PTA funding but 2) Title One dollars are very restricted and so cannot be used for the choices that many PTAs make.
- PTAs, no matter the school, are raising funds to benefit ALL the kids at their schools. Garfield HS PTSA used to raise funds for after-school tutoring for struggling students. This certainly wasn't for the HCC kids but for kids who truly needed the help. They didn't have to do that but they did. For years.
- One commenter hit a nail right on the head. Last count I saw, PTAs fund about 23-25 FTE in the district. Many of those positions are IAs at the dual language schools in the North where parents were told - long ago - that the program would not work well with just one native speaker in the classroom. So parents fundraise to provide Its. That benefits the program and makes it stronger. (But I believe that Hampson and Rankin also have a bee in their bonnet over this program as well.)
As well, many PTAs kick in .2 to .5 to help fully fund positions that otherwise might be half-time. Half-time positions generally don't help as much as full-time positions.
All that said, I still don't agree with funding positions because of the stress on parents and the worry for principals if the parents can't raise the money. I also don't like that both the district and the Board NEVER stop this. They could but they don't because it works for the district's bottom line and makes schools stronger. If there was such an equity concern, this would be the first thing to shut down.
- Lastly, both Hampson and Rankin were high up in SCPTSA. Why didn't they lead the charge to change this then? Why isn't the current SCPTSA leading this work? Because it would be better coming from them rather than some district policy.
Whatever happens, that policy better apply to ALL entities that fundraise for SPS. All of them.
But with Chandra at the helm, that doesn't seem likely. Instead it seems like we're going to see a city with 35% private school attendance, like San Francisco.
Fog Horn
Booster clubs will just move their activities away from schools, decreasing access. They mostly fund after school activities. They are already expert at keeping the funding streams separate from ASB, PTSA & schools funds. I don't think SPS has any idea what money is flowing through those groups.
PTSAs however, have promoted these leaders and their ideas. Now they will be required to show their allegiance.
Leave PTAs alone. There is never a guarantee that district or school level dollars will reach the students- especially when administrative costs are involved. PTA dollars are one mechanism that will actually allow the dollars to reach students.
While the SEA Collective bargaining agreement states that schools should be providing funding in their annual budgets for library materials, only 27% of the annual funding for materials comes from SPS. And, 48% of schools spent $0 on library materials.
In addition, Tier 1 and 2 schools fare the worst when SPS does not fund library materials and instead forces PTSAs and librarians (through book fairs and grant applications) to pay for library materials students need and want. 55% (11 of 20) Tier 1|2 schools spent $0 last year on library materials with money from SPS.
With a reading goal in our strategic plan I am left wondering how SPS can continue to dodge their responsibility to the students of the district. In addition, the board needs to hop on the book mobile and demand that SPS honor the CBA.
Sure, we believe in equity just so long as it doesn't cost anything.
Libraries for All
The present path is equity by elimination. Take everything away until there is - actually, equality, since they don't seem to be pursuing equity.
It is 100% the case that parent fundraising began with the weighted student formula. That's when librarians were cut to half time in K-8, reading and math intervention teachers cut from schools with fewer free-and-reduced lunch students, counselors eliminated, instrumental music cut in half, copy and supply budgets slashed. All those things drove parent fundraising. It wasn't about buying anything fancy, it was replacing standard parts of an elementary education that were eliminated for many schools.
Re Budget/High Stick/Melissa's comments re Title I vs. PTA funding. True that Title I funding is highly restricted but there are other aspects of the weighted student formula driving the huge imbalance in district funding of schools, not only the title I portion. Looking at the last budget, 4 schools within a 4 mile radius of mine had $6,000, $4,000, $3,000, and $2,000 more per kid in their allocation. Some of their needs are higher overall, so I understand why they get smaller class sizes and more intervention support. The problem is, we still have kids who struggle, kids in poverty, kids from trauma - and everyday kids with no official challenges who should also be getting a great education.
The pressure to not fund-raise is huge now. For us that means cuts in library, reading and math intervention, Tier II tutoring support, and supplies. We've also been told not to ask parents for supply funds or to provide supplies. We are not to ask for field trip money, so no field trips or busses, and we can't provide scholarships anyway because no fundraising. The $100-$300 per kid we had fundraised in the past several years is a small fraction of the difference in the per student dollars of our school compared to higher needs schools.
So now we're back to the REAL inequity. The kids with resources get rich extracurricular experiences. Kids whose families have time and knowledge take them to the places we used to visit as a class. We used to collect about $20 per kid, scholarships available, and provide every classroom supply for the year. No personal supplies were allowed; everyone got exactly the same thing. Now we're back to sneaking parents Amazon wish lists, Donor's Choose, and teachers dropping hundreds of dollars out of pocket if they want their class to have notebooks and colored pencil, paper, markers. Somehow the concept of the community sharing costs to provide for the school is now a white privileged, racist idea.
Anyone who fights back will have that label attached to them, so we will sit back and watch the system degrade.
-Seattlelifer.
One doesn't need to look at OSPI reports to determine that our schools are failing. For example:
Chief Seatlh: 87% of students did NOT meet math standards
76% of students did NOT meet science standards
Ingraham: 60% of students have not met math standards
53% have not met science standards
40 % have not met ELA
Ballard High School: 60 Percent of students have NOT met math standards
70% of students have not met science standards
The list goes on:
Rainier Beach High School: 90 Percent of students have not met math standards
85% have not met science standards
Eckstein: 46 percent have not met math standards
Whitman: 47 percent of students have not met math standards.
The district is literally failing tens of thousands of students. NOW, during a pandemic, is the time to partner with parents to assure student success. We may see an uptick of Covid cases in the fall. This is not the time to tie hands- not when tens of thousands of lives are at risk.
Give kids some type of chance. Geesh
-Skeptical parent
Pressuring the other board members is probably the most effective route, followed by running a slate of reform candidates (reform as in "fix SPS", not as in Gates Foundation style reform) for the four open seats in the 2023 election.
No Racism
https://www.seattleschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/DirDist_portrait_DD3.pdf
Rankin also needs to go. She is in District 1.
https://www.seattleschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/DirDist_landscape_DD1.pdf
I have no idea if Harris will run again - she's served two terms and the last couple of years have been rough. She's out in West Seattle.