Cold, hard cash (Part 1) - History Lesson

With budgets trending leaner and meaner, school fundraising is a bigger priority than ever-yet parents are getting fed up with feeling bligated to pitch in. What's the lesson here?

When the school district in Mount Vernon, New York, faced a dire budget crisis, officials decided to eliminate all high school sports teams for the 2008-2009 school year.

Parents were outraged. Students were devastated. In this working-class Westchester County community, sports are a crucial way to keep kids in school.

To the rescue: the Mount Vernon Educational Foundation. Like similar organizations around the country, it was formed by parents specifically to raise money for enrichment programs. The coaches and school district asked the group, started in 2003, to spearhead a fundraising campaign to restore the highly ranked athletics lineup.

The response was swift—and awesome. A rival high school contributed $800 from ticket and raffle sales. Former Mount Vernon residents Denzel Washington and Ben Gordon of the Chicago Bulls made highly publicized donations. A couple from a neighboring community asked that wedding guests give money to the foundation rather than buy registry gifts, netting more than $15,000.

In the end, nearly $1 million was raised and the kids were back in action. The following year, the school district lost some middle school teams, but managed to find money in its budget to preserve sports at the high school level.

"The goal was to keep the athletes in school, help them graduate and attends college," says Ronnie Cox, president of the foundation.

There was no question of going back, hat in hand, to ask for more private donations.

That's because while it can be relatively easy to whip up support for a one-time campaign, it's much harder to score big donations on an ongoing basis.

"I made it very clear to the school board and the superintendent that this was a one-time emergency that should not have to be repeated," says Cox. "It's the responsibility of the school board and superintendent to manage the resources to meet the community's needs. The foundation will partner with the school district, but not replace it."

The Mount Vernon story exemplifies the best and worst of school fundraising in these tough times. People can be incredibly generous. But you can't repeatedly ask everyone to open their wallets.

History Lesson

Bake sales, car washes, raffles, auctions - fundraising is nothing new. But the reality of multiple years of slashed budgets means schools aren't just trying to cover extras like arts, athletics and field trips but core necessities. In some cases, parents have banded together to raise money to literally keep schools open and pay teachers' salaries.

Such activities raise not only money but serious issues. When a wealthy suburban area is affected by budget cuts, the parents have the wherewithal to step forward to do pretty much whatever it takes to retain a teacher, program or athletic team, says Dan Domenech, Ph.D., executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. In poor communities? Not so. "That lack of resources is a major factor in terms of widening the achievement gap," says Domenech.

However, raising money for photo equipment is a far cry from selling cookies to pay teachers' salaries. In 2009 the West Lafayette Schools Education Foundation in Indiana raised $217,000 to bring back five teachers who had been laid off due to budget cuts. Chuck Saylors, immediate past president of the National PTA, who is also a school board trustee in Greenville, South Carolina, worries about relying on fundraisers to essentially subsidize educational needs.

"That's very dangerous," according to Saylors. "Five years from now, when funding is more stable, state and county elected officials are going to say, 'We don't need to put more money in. The parents will pay.'" And relying on fund-raising to cover basics makes it nearly impossible to do long-range planning, adds Domenech, because schools can't count on a similar amount of money coming in every year.