Portland schools’ equity-focused fundraising model faces growing pains – oregonlive.com:
It’s been 16 months since Portland Public Schools board members voted to dismantle a system that allowed parents to raise money to pay salaries and benefits of extra staff members at their own children’s schools.
The former system required individual schools’ foundations to contribute one-third of any money over $10,000 that they raised to a common pot. That money was in turn parceled out to dozens of schools that serve communities that could not raise tens of thousands of dolllars.
It typically brought in between $2 and $4 million a year.
That wasn’t an enormous amount in a system with a general operating budget of $868 million. But it was enough to subsidize the equivalent of about 20 teachers or teaching assistants districtwide.
Portland Public Schools made it impossible for parents to financially support and improve their own public schools. So parents said, “Fine. I won’t.”
And this wasn’t just rich parents cutting a check. From an early story:
The board’s decision infuriated some donors at the district’s wealthiest schools, many of whom have spent years raising funds — through auctions, jog-a-thons and direct appeals — to pay for educational assistants, library aides, art teachers, reading specialists and classroom teachers.
Literally, the school board left parents without a way to directly financially support their own kids’ schools and teachers.
Back to present day:
‘The new plan created a single districtwide fundraising arm, intended to harness donations from businesses and philanthropies alongside parents, grandparents and alumni. Proponents of the concept praised it as more equitable than the previous system that allowed wealthier, and typically whiter, families to at least partially insulate their own children’s schools from the whiplash of budget cuts.
Equity once again drives everybody to the lowest point possible in education.
In its first year and change, the model, spearheaded by an independent nonprofit dubbed the Fund for PPS, has notched some notable wins, including dedicating $660,000 to provide literacy tutoring at nearly every elementary school this school year, a promising program that helped lift the reading skills of hundreds of children.
Their fundraising goal for the first year, not “first year and change,” was $2.5 million.
But the new system has also experienced its share of growing pains.
In its first year, the new system generated much less money than the old one did.
And in just the past few weeks, the volunteer chair of the fund’s board stepped down from her role after a public dispute with several school board members that played out in the opinion page and letters to the editor section of The Oregonian. The remaining board members are actively searching for the inaugural executive director of the reformulated Fund for PPS, a key position that’s so far gone unfilled. They’re also seeking at least two new board members.
And after its relatively modest distributions for the current school year, which also included $70,000 for math support for ninth and 10th grade students and $200,000 for food pantries at 20 schools, the fund’s coffers are depleted.
Expenses outpaced revenue in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and $100,000 was held back from grant-making to seed fundraising efforts over the next nine months.
This is such an obvious turd-burger that people quit, no one will sign on, they’ve had acrimonious public disputes, and they’ve held back $100,000 just to try to raise money that they used to be able to get as a matter of course.