Multilayered cake
Disparities deepen as schools rely more on parents’ bake sales, wallets
Stephenie Falcone’s children attend two Denver schools just a mile apart, but when it comes to fundraising power, the differences are vast. The contrast was particularly stark Dec. 8. At Gilpin Montessori that afternoon, parents and students scraped together $300 by selling nut-free zucchini bread, red velvet cookies and bagels during the school’s “Winter Wonderland” concert. Nearly three-quarters of the school’s students come from lowincome families.
On the same day, a parent-teacher group at Polaris at Ebert Elementary, a gifted and talented magnet school with few poor students, raised $14,400 through a direct giving campaign.
The gap between the two schools’ fundraising totals will probably exceed $100,000 by the end of the year — with Gilpin’s parents covering expenses such as books, soccer T-shirts and field trips, while Polaris’ parents raise enough to cover teacher or paraprofessional salaries.
The disparity between the two schools is hardly unique. The school fundraising playing field has always been uneven, reflecting the socioeconomic status of each school’s population.
But observers say it has gotten worse in recent years as state education cuts have forced more expenses onto the shoulders of Colorado parents — in the form of additional fees and ever-increasing fundraising goals. While
high-powered parent groups work mightily to compensate for slashed funding, many schools slog along with low-dollar butter-braid sales. And so the divide grows.
“This is the state not fulfilling the obligation to our kids,” said Lisa Weil, executive director of Great Education Colorado, a group that advocates for improved state education funding.
Colorado ranked 42 among states and Washington, D.C., for per-pupil education funding, according to Education Week’s 2016 Quality Counts report.
Weil likened the growing fundraising burden to a frog in boiling water — with the water heating so gradually, there’s no sudden sense of danger.
“Parents need to realize that the water has been boiling for a while.”
With every infusion of fundraising cash, she said, “You’re dropping ice cubes into boiling water and it’s better, but as long as the source of the problem is getting worse, you just cannot keep up.”
As a parent of children at two very different schools, Falcone doesn’t fault Polaris parents for their fundraising prowess, but wishes more could be done to close the gap.
At Gilpin, she said, raising big bucks is like “chipping away at a giant glacier with a spoon.”
The fortunate few
More than a half-dozen Colorado PTAs or PTOs — most in Denver — reported income of $200,000 or more in 2013, according to Guidestar, which maintains a database of nonprofit financial reports. At least a dozen more reported more than $100,000.
“I don’t blame them,” said Shawna Fritzler, a Jeffco parent and treasurer of the Colorado PTA. “I want to do the best for my school, too. But at the same time, I hate creating that inequity.”
Slavens, Steele, Bromwell, Westerly Creek, Lowry, Bill Roberts, Cory, Swigert and University Park are among the highest fundraising schools in Denver, according to Guidestar.
At many higher-income schools, parents have the time and know-how to organize galas, wine-tastings and auctions. They may be able to line up lucrative sponsorships or secure big-ticket auction items — things such as week-long Mexican getaways and limousine outings.
Many also have the means to attend ticketed fundraisers and contribute generously to their schools’ direct giving campaigns.
But tapping parents in the same way at Gilpin and many other district schools is unrealistic.
“Our school has working parents, single parents, grandparents raising their grandchildren,” said Jenn Koelliker, a Gilpin parent. “We don’t have stay-athome moms with middle-class backgrounds like myself going out and using their free time to raise money.”
Slavens, in southeast Denver, reported earning $260,000 from six fundraising events in 2013 — $187,000 of that from an auction, according to IRS documents.
The K-8 school, where just 8 percent of students are eligible for free or discounted meals, clearly communicates its expectation that families contribute to the “culture of giving.”
Principal Kurt Siebold acknowledged that Slavens is among the fortunate few, but said even with the PTA’s ambitious fundraising efforts, the school isn’t staffed as well as it was nine years ago when he started there.
“I’ve had to tighten the belt in the whole school budget,” he said.
He said the problem is even greater for schools in the middle of the socioeconomic pack — the ones that don’t pack a hard fundraising punch but don’t receive federal Title I funds earmarked for schools with large low-income populations.
Mark Ferrandino, Denver Public Schools’ chief financial officer, agreed and said that such schools can get access to a special $8 million pot of district money called “budget assistance.”
Paying for staff
There’s not much transparency in the school fundraising world. Most parent groups operate in relative seclusion, with record-keeping typically left to volunteers.
While Guidestar provides IRS records for some PTA chapters or similar parent groups, they are sometimes outof-date or incomplete. School districts may track the money to some extent, but their records are not typically accessible to the public.
Many people don’t understand how state education funding impacts the school fundraising landscape, said Jonna Levine, public policy director for Colorado PTA.
A lot of people don’t “pay attention to what’s going on and what creates that fundraising hole.”
Financial documents for schools that routinely raise $100,000 or more a year reveal that many are using the money to pay for staff salaries — allowing them to lower staff-student ratios, give teachers more planning time or offer instruction that might not otherwise be available.
For example, fundraising by the Polaris PTO this year helped pay for two teachers, according to the group’s minutes.
The Colorado Gives fundraising website shows that at Steele Elementary in the affluent Washington Park neighborhood, the PTA pays for paraprofessionals or interns in every classroom and two part-time teachers who work with struggling students.
To experts, recurring expenses such as staff salaries shouldn’t fall to parents. They’re basics that should be covered by state per-pupil funding.
Even at Gilpin — where annual fundraising tops out at $15,000 — generating enough money to pay for additional staff is the ultimate goal.
Parents who are part of the school’s fundraising arm, “Friends of Gilpin,” say they need $60,000 to bring back seven City Year staff members who last year served as mentors and coaches. The energetic college graduates provided extra hands in the classroom and eased discipline problems at the school, which is under threat of closure.
“My goal is to raise that kind of money this year,” said Koelliker.
But most of it won’t come out of parents’ pocketbooks.
In fact, the school’s most successful fundraiser is a home tour in the Five Points neighborhood that targets community members rather than parents. Last year’s inaugural tour brought in $4,000, and this year it raised $8,000.
No easy answers
While some parents and educators daydream about a scenario in which affluent schools share their fundraising proceeds with struggling schools, they know there would be resistance.
“I think you’d get pushback from the parents,” said Brenda Kazin, principal of Denver’s Place Bridge Academy, a low-income school where fundraisers bring in about $2,500 a year.
That said, many schools do extend help to the less advantaged — say, by contributing to a community nonprofit or offering help to a sister school. Such contributions can be a hodgepodge, however, neither sustained nor systematic.
In northwest Denver, an annual bar and restaurant crawl called “Totally Tennyson” provides something of an antidote to the every-man-for-himself model of school fundraising. The event raises around $60,000 for 15 schools in the area — both high-income and lowincome.
To leaders of Colorado’s PTA, parent groups should focus on advocacy, not fundraising.
“You have some parents who can fundraise like nobody’s business,” Levine said.
But they could make a big difference if they put some of that energy into advocating for state-level change on school funding.
“Until people really start coming out in droves,” she said, “it’s not going to change.”