Portland Public Schools’ new foundation falls short of early fundraising goals – oregonlive.com:
Portland Public Schools’ fledgling districtwide foundation has only $152,000 to invest in staffing across the district’s 81 campuses in the upcoming school year.
…it is a tiny fraction of the $2 million to $4 million per year that parent-driven fundraising to pay mostly for staff at individual schools used to bring in before school board members voted 5-2 in 2024 to dismantle that system, citing equity concerns because not all schools were able to raise significant sums of money.
The school board stopped parents from helping to fund their own kids’ education, so parents stopped. Not a stunner.
In April, a group of parents pressed school board members to return to the old system, at least temporarily, and allow school communities to raise funds toward staff salaries, given the $56 million that the district needed to cut from its budget. Ultimately, that deficit led the district to lay off 87 teachers last month.
Under the old system, local school foundations could keep the first $10,000 they raised; one-third of all donations beyond that went to a districtwide fund and were redistributed among schools that could not raise similar amounts on their own.
Now, individual school communities may still raise money and don’t have to share any of it with the Fund for PPS, but may not use the money to pay for staff salaries and benefits.
Oh well, I guess the school board can feel righteous about stopping the rich from helping.
But a majority of board members balked at the request, saying the districtwide foundation just needed time to build credibility and capacity among donors.
School board chair Eddie Wang said Thursday that he still believes that’s the case, though the district is facing an even larger budget deficit, estimated at $65 million, for the 2027-28 school year.
If money is what you need, I don’t think beggars should be choosers. And Portland Public Schools are definitely the beggars in this scenario.
“I don’t think the old system is fundamentally an equitable system,” Wang said. “We can have a better system, but it is going to take work.”
It wasn’t a “fundamentally equitable” system. Life, too, is not a fundamentally equitable system. This would be a good lesson to learn. But your alternative is for wealthier families to either not give money or to abandon public schools altogether. When you stop people from being able to directly impact outcomes, they’ll quit. And so they have.