How budget cuts and PTA fundraising undermined equity in San Francisco public schools
A kid buys tickets at the Halloween-Día de los Muertos fundraiser for Junipero Serra Elementary in Bernal Heights. The issue netted $iii,000 for the PTA. Credit: Tearsa Joy Hammock, San Francisco Public Press
Evelyn Cheung is the principal of Junipero Serra Elementary School in Bernal Heights. Matthew Reedy is the principal of Grattan Simple in the Haight. Both San Francisco public schools faced five straight years of districtwide upkeep cuts — which hit hardest in 2010 with a $113 million shortfall and last school year came to a more than manageable $13 million.
Merely the belt tightening did not injure the ii schools every bit. Cheung was forced to lay off staff and accept other drastic steps, similar freezing supply purchases for a year. Past contrast, Reedy hired new staff and expanded his school's bookish programs, helping raise standardized test scores.
Why? The deviation lay in the ability of their parent-teacher associations to enhance coin. The Grattan PTA has budgeted hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, amounting to almost $1,000 per pupil. At Junipero Serra, where most students come from poor and immigrant families, the PTA raises approximately $25 per educatee.
"Every principal knows which schools accept it and which schools don't," Cheung said. "We know who are the haves and who are the have-nots. The system just isn't equitable."
In an era of shrinking public investment in schools, parents have struggled to agree the line one school at a time. Since the pre-recession year 2007, elementary school PTAs in San Francisco collectively managed to more than quadruple their spending on schools.
With this money, some schools have been able to pay teachers and staff, buy computers and school supplies, and underwrite class outings and enrichment activities. These expenses, previously covered by the taxpayers, are increasingly the responsibility of parents.
But schoolhouse district finance data, PTA tax records and demographic profiles reveal an unintended byproduct of parents' heroic efforts: The growing reliance on individual dollars has widened inequities between the impoverished bulk and the pocket-size number of schools where affluent parents cluster.
Different some California schoolhouse districts, which centralize and redistribute funds raised by parents, San Francisco so far has permitted all money raised at a schoolhouse to stay in that location. This gives some schools an enormous advantage. School commune data show that in 2022 (the well-nigh recent year tax records were bachelor), parents of children at just 10 elementary schools raised $2.77 meg — more money than those at the other 61 combined.
By bringing in as much as $1,500 per pupil, the top fundraising schools appear to have been largely insulated from the effects of budgets cuts. Meanwhile, parents at high-poverty schools such as Junipero Serra are seeing shrinking resource for their children. This means laid-off staff, dilapidated libraries, outdated computers and a dearth of essential supplies like pencils and paper.
Rachel Norton, president of the San Francisco Board of Education, said she and her colleagues were aware of significant disparities in the fundraising capacities of PTAs in the commune. But administrators exercise non rails donations, nor do they try to interfere with schoolhouse fundraising.
"I'd never ding parents for raising money to provide more services and extras for their schools, especially in a state like California that has chronically underfunded schools," Norton said. "The more economically various students the schools concenter, the ameliorate off the schools will exist."
But fewer and fewer schools in San Francisco are attracting economically diverse students. The number of children from poor families is ascension across the commune, and there are more than schools with loftier concentrations of poverty than there were 10 years ago. Meanwhile, the number of mixed-income schools is shrinking.
Critics of rising income inequality say school districts across the country, in a blitz to save public schools with individual dollars, created a system in which education is improving for the affluent and declining for the poor.
"Parent fundraising has go more of import as land and local funds have dwindled," said Robert Reich, a quondam U.S. secretary of labor and now a political scientific discipline professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who advocates for policies to close the gap between rich and poor.
"If we take the platonic of equal opportunity seriously," Reich said, "we've got to commit ourselves to creating a organization of public pedagogy in which kids from poor and working-grade families have a genuinely equal opportunity to succeed. And we're falling far curt."
In an effort to accost unequal parent fundraising caput-on, some Bay Area schoolhouse districts have pioneered novel solutions that might be instructive to San Francisco. One is aggregating private dollars, and directing them to the schools that need the most assist. Other California districts prohibit PTAs from paying for instructor salaries or training, a common do that tin can significantly widen inequities among schools.
San Francisco PTA fundraising increased since 2002, merely near of it paid for programs at just a handful of schools. (Click to enlarge) Graphic by Tom Guffey, San Francisco Public Press
But with an expected influx of state money this year, San Francisco will take new policy options to address the growing inequities in the district. The city's schools stand to bring in as much every bit $21.7 meg more equally soon as September, through Gov. Jerry Brown'south newly enacted Local Control Funding Formula, which provides extra funds to districts with many disadvantaged students. If pupil populations remain stable, this new money could grow to $184.6 million annually in eight years.
With a current school district upkeep of $667 million, the new funds would represent an increase of 27 percent.
As San Francisco'south Board of Education prepares to hold public meetings this jump on how to spend the extra funds, the fate of increasingly unequal public schools could exist in the hands of parents themselves. That may mean endorsing reforms to ensure more than equitable local funding, or agreeing to share fundraising proceeds amidst schools.
Some schools dodged cuts
Matthew Reedy started working equally a teacher at Grattan Elementary in the Haight in 2002. That was the year the district'south Weighted Student Formula took effect. The policy, devised equally a mode to help disadvantaged children, provides schools with a base rate of funding for each pupil, currently $2,896, and adds dollars based on need, such as the number of children receiving special educational activity services, free and reduced-price lunches and lessons in English as a 2d language. Then per-capita funding for schools is highly variable only generally biased toward schools with disadvantaged students.
The goal is non strict equality, just rather equity, meaning preferential funding for schools that need it most. San Francisco schools with many poor and immigrant students accept bigger budgets on a per-pupil footing than do flush schools, whose students are less expensive to educate.
When the formula went into effect in 2002, Reedy said, affluent schools such equally Grattan lost funding, and parents felt compelled to make up the divergence.
That yr, simple schoolhouse PTAs in San Francisco brought in a full of just $592,000. Only through 2011, their combined budgets had ballooned to $5.32 million, an increase of most 800 percent.
(The Public Printing examined information from elementary schools but based on the tax records of legally recognized PTAs.)
As parent fundraising increased, and so did the gap betwixt the richest and poorest schools.
In 2010, Reedy became Grattan'southward main. Today, only 21 percentage of 359 students there qualify for free and reduced-cost tiffin. That is one-third the district average, making it one of the wealthiest schools in a commune whose students overall have gotten poorer. Not surprisingly, the Grattan PTA is one of the most successful fundraisers in the commune.
In the 2012–2013 school year, the PTA at Grattan had a budget of $353,000, about $983 per pupil, on superlative of the base $2,896 the schoolhouse receives from the district for each student. The parents rely on an array of labor-intensive fundraising methods: "Count Me In!" parties with ticket prices up to $75, vino raffles and auctions, foundation grants, "Dine Out for Grattan" nights at participating restaurants, and a sophisticated e-newsletter and website.
(See Flickr for a photograph essay on fundraising for public education by Tearsa Joy Hammock and Luke Thomas)
Reedy said Grattan has been spared the sting of upkeep cuts, thanks entirely to these parent fundraising efforts. "We've been able to take PTA money and donate it to our full general fund to prevent layoffs," he said.
Not just did the PTA protect jobs, information technology expanded Grattan's academic programs by hiring reading specialists and a technology instructor, and adding a bilingual clerk and a parent liaison to the staff. The PTA also funds an actress teacher, helping Grattan reduce its average class size. In all, this schoolhouse year the Grattan PTA is paying all or function of the salaries of half-dozen staff, totaling nigh $224,000. PTA money also supported the library, a garden that doubles as a scientific discipline lab and a calculator lab that is often cited equally one of Grattan'due south primal strengths, amid other programs.
Like many principals, Reedy sets spending priorities in consultation with a schoolhouse site council, which includes parents, teachers and neighbors. Their decision to invest PTA funds in academics has paid off. From 2008 to 2013, Grattan improved standardized exam scores from 787 to 923 points on a scale of 1,000, making it 1 of the commune'south academically best-performing unproblematic schools.
While the sums raised by Grattan's PTA may seem tiny compared with a district budget of $667 meg, Grattan'southward example reveals how modest — but concentrated — amounts of individual money can keep an entire school afloat. For schools with the means, parent fundraising is a solution to upkeep cuts.
Only the Public Press analysis finds that the bulk of San Francisco schools are unable to enhance coin at the same level. Indeed, reliance on parent fundraising appears to undermine the equitability goal of the district's ain funding methods.
How cuts create inequity
Junipero Serra Elementary is situated between Holly Courts, a depression-income housing projection, and the hilltop Holly Park in Bernal Heights. Visitors hear more Castilian than English in the school's hallways — ninety percent of the 269 students are immigrants or the children of immigrants, mainly from Latin America.
Karen Curtiss takes a donation at the annual Halloween-Día de los Muertos celebration at Junipero Serra Elementary School. Credit: Tearsa Joy Hammock, San Francisco Public Printing
As primary, Evelyn Cheung has had to make difficult choices in the past five years, in consultation with teachers and parents. I year they stopped ownership supplies. The budget for the library fell to $500. Cheung was forced to lay off classroom aides, the nurse, the social worker and all "consultancies" — mainly arts teachers. The layoffs hurt morale more than other cuts, Cheung said, "considering it'southward people."
"They accept emotional ties, and there are bad feelings when someone is laid off," she said.
Why can't Junipero Serra fundraise its way effectually upkeep cuts? In part, because the parents accept less to give, at to the lowest degree every bit measured past costless or reduced-toll lunches. At Junipero Serra, 86 pct of students qualify, more than four times every bit many every bit at Grattan.
To qualify for reduced-toll dejeuner in California, a family of four must make less than $42,643 a year. To qualify for gratis lunch, less than $29,965. Researchers use these markers as proxies to measure poverty.
The drastic situation faced by most of Junipero Serra'due south families is, in fact, shared by 63 percent of families throughout San Francisco'southward public schoolhouse system. This represents a 10 percentage increase since the outset of the recession, which coincided with the starting time of the budget cuts.
This poverty has also become more concentrated. Data from the district prove that the number of schools in which more than three-quarters of students are eligible for subsidized lunch has more than tripled in the past decade. Schools in which fewer than one-quarter qualify increased slightly. Meanwhile, the middle class is disappearing: The portion of schools in between those extremes of poverty and wealth cruel, from 66 per centum to 52 percent.
While Cheung lauded the ideals behind the weighted educatee formula, and similar federal programs such as Championship I, she said electric current funding levels were not plenty for schools with big numbers of disadvantaged students.
"Many of my parents don't have the resource that many eye-class families accept," Cheung said. "We have to provide a reckoner lab and technology training for the kids considering they don't take computers at abode. And they volition become to eye school very far behind if we don't provide that support."
(See photo essay, "Two PTA Presidents, Two Realities.")
No easy solutions
This is how budget cuts perpetuate inequity: Affluent families are able to make upward for lost funding by altruistic both time and coin, whereas schools with poor families struggle to fill the gap. School district data show that as the number of students getting gratis and reduced-price luncheon rises, PTA budgets fall. At the 44 unproblematic schools where a majority of the students live in poverty, fundraising is insufficient to offset budget cuts. Those cuts add together stress to communities already struggling with low wages, financial instability and discrimination.
Can the system be improved, or are we doomed to perpetuate the cycle of inequality? This problem is not unique to San Francisco. As anti-taxation sentiment in recent years has reduced school funding nationwide, parents are increasingly fundraising to keep their own kids' schools adrift.
In response, some California districts created centralized PTA foundations to redistribute funds to schools based on need (meet story on the solution used in the E Bay city of Albany). Others prohibited PTAs from raising funds for personnel or professional development.
The Santa Monica-Malibu school district embraced both solutions in 2011, under Superintendent Sandra Lyon. Today the district's education foundation is the merely way parents can donate money to support teachers and staff.
The fundamental worry nearly such systems is that they will reduce the incentive for parents to support public schools beyond what they already pay in taxes. Lyon said her district struggled with the transition: "There are even so some who believe parent money should stay at their children's schools, and they are strongly confronting the modify."
The reform caused some flush Malibu residents to try to break off from more than working-class Santa Monica to create a separate school district. At to the lowest degree one Malibu schoolhouse refused to participate in revenue sharing.
Overall, the district's PTAs are struggling to heighten as much as in previous years, Lyon said. Still, she sees progress. The foundation launched a $four million entrada terminal spring, and past late fall 2022 information technology had raised $2.4 million.
"Some of our wealthiest Santa Monica schools have the greatest participation," Lyon said. "Indeed, beyond Santa Monica schools, some of the loudest opponents have become the biggest champions and are leading the charges at their schools."
Lyon has seen a culture change in a district heavily divided past social class. "Schools are collaborating in ways they had non done earlier," she said. "The inequity in schools had bothered many for years, and so there has been support for the notion that we are working to create a improve education for all students."
The Santa Monica-Malibu commune is one-fifth the size of San Francisco Unified. Every pedagogy leader interviewed dismissed the idea that such a system would work in San Francisco, largely because of the commune'due south size and diversity. Most defended the status quo.
Many educators fear losing support from affluent parents, who accept the choice to quit the public schools birthday and enroll their children in private schools — or flee to suburban schools. Harvey Milk Elementary chief Tracy Peoples said fundraising can create that kind of parental date.
"For schools similar ours that practise not qualify for additional funding based on examination scores or student demographics, we depend on the parent community to step in to help raise boosted funds for our students," Peoples said.
Considering the San Francisco Unified Schoolhouse Commune does non keep track of donations to PTAs, parents and educators take not had an accurate motion picture of how they cistron into inequities amidst individual schools.
Simply every bit California moves this year to pour millions of dollars into various, high-poverty districts similar San Francisco, parents and educators must ask themselves difficult questions virtually which students were hurt most by five years of budgets cuts — and who was rescued by PTA fundraising.
Volunteers gathered on a Saturday in November at Grattan Unproblematic for the first campuswide greening work day. They unloaded two tons of sand, painted, cleaned upward and gardened. Credit: Luke Thomas, San Francisco Public Press
Some parents have led a grassroots motion to counteract the inequities. Alvarado parent Todd David worked with peers in 2008 to launch EdMatch, a Spider web-based volunteer effort to enlist corporations and philanthropists to lucifer funds raised for San Francisco public schools. The money was distributed to the most impoverished.
"EdMatch is a skillful system," board president Rachel Norton said, "because it encourages people to voluntarily opt in, without penalizing parents who are working really hard." But EdMatch, while noble in intent, has struggled more than than five years to increase participation, raising only $100,000 last year — well short of its $6 1000000 goal.
From charity to advocacy
The most effective solutions may exist political, non charitable.
Reich counsels parents troubled by growing public-school inequities to plough their energies from giving to advocating for reform. He said they should work to raise taxation rates for the wealthy, decouple schoolhouse budgets from property taxes and target state and local resources to the poorest schools.
In a Sept. 4 op-ed for The New York Times, Stanford political scientific discipline professor Rob Reich (no relation to the coincidentally named Robert Reich) went a footstep farther, proposing that the federal government create a special charitable status for schoolhouse-based PTAs, and so that those who give to poor schools get double deductions and those who requite to affluent schools go none.
Norton said the changes in country funding take sparked other possible reform ideas specific to San Francisco.
"Nosotros desperately demand to reweight the student formula," she said. This may be the well-nigh decisive battle to be waged in the adjacent year on behalf of poor and immigrant schools such as Junipero Serra.
"A well-educated populace is the key to a healthy democracy," said David, the Alvarado parent, who turned to full-time education activism afterward a successful Wall Street career. "Public education is an investment, not an expenditure. My grandparents were immigrants. They came to the United states of america, they got a public didactics, they lived the American dream. Educational activity is the one way we know that can assistance each person rise, generation later generation. If you care about the futurity of America, educational activity for all kids is in all our interests."
Jeremy Adam Smith is a beau with the Found for Justice and Journalism. He edits the website of U.C. Berkeley'due south Greater Good Scientific discipline Center and is author or coeditor of four books, including "The Daddy Shift," "Rad Dad" and "The Compassionate Instinct." His son briefly attended both Junipero Serra and Grattan.
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Source: https://edsource.org/2014/how-budget-cuts-and-pta-fundraising-undermined-equity-in-san-francisco-public-schools/63488
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