Janney PTA raised $1.4 million in one year

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

These PTAs absolutely do this. Many schools collect books at book fairs to help fill shelves in poorer parts of the city and coat drives to fill sister-school requests. There are organizations who's sole purpose is to make the connection between rich and poor PTOs and many of these school participate in this.

Lafayette, for example, has an entire program called Lafayette Gives back, sponsored by the HSA, whose sole purpose is to give, and to teach kids to give, to others. This includes packing backpacks for foster kids, making care packages for first-responders and collecting baby carriers for refugees.

Do you not see how forcing poor kids to rely on the noblesse oblige of the .01% is an enormously fucked up way to fund basic social services such as education?

Huh? People have spent the last 4 pages complaining that rich PTAs should help poor schools. Now, when it comes to light that they do, in fact, help poorer school, it's fucked up? No one is relying on anything or forcing anyone to do anything.

Poor school kids get often X2 the funding as rich school kids.

The point is that it should be transparent and obligatory, if we're going to keep on allowing PTAs to raise money for specific schools. As in, 10% of the money has to go to grants for other schools.

Because why? Andy you can't not allow PTAs to raise funds, all you can do is tell them you can't pay for things at a school.

And it is HUGELY transparent. You can see the budgets on all the schools' websites.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This does look like sloppy reporting. At our school, we pay the HSA for every field trip. So if 100 students pay $10 each to the HSA to go to the Natural History Museum, it would appear that the HSA "raised" $1000. Then if you figure there are 7 grades and each grade goes on roughly 10 trips a year, it now looks like the HSA raised $70,000. But that is not fundraising, that's me paying for my kid to go on a field trip.

If you didn't pay for the field trip, the field trip would not happen. That's fundraising. The fact that the amount of money raised is equal to the cost of the activity is irrelevant.

It is not fundraising to pay for the cost of a field trip. It is not fundraising for parents to PAY for aftercare for their child just because the HSA/PTA is a conduit for those funds to go to the private provider of aftercare services. The aftercare provider could just as easily accept the funds directly from parents who are paying for care and the HSA would never be involved, it would just be a parent paying for a service.

The HSA is used as a pass-through for the fund to then go directly to pay for the bus or Metro to take the kids to the museum. Would you call it fundraising if instead we paid the school directly for the field trip like when I was a kid?

The CAP study is all about supplemental money in public education—in other words, money on top of what is allocated to schools from the school district. The reason is that traditionally most districts only compare resource equity by comparing school budgets. But if—within a single school district—there is one school that consistently receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in supplemental money from an outside organization, and another school consistently receives zero, and the primary difference between those two schools is race, then there is inequity. The question is, what responsibility, if any, does the school district have to address the inequity?

Your example assumes that every parent has the financial wherewithal to pay for the field trip, so it does not matter whether the money is paid to the PTA or directly to the school, because regardless of which entity receives the money, the trip will happen. Not every parent can afford the field trip, and when those parents are concentrated in a single school, the field trip will not happen. Therefore, the school with parents that can universally afford the field trip are receiving a benefit that another school may not receive.

Fine. Forget field trips.

Aftercare. Aftercare is not provided by DCPS at most (any?) upper NW schools. So a private entity provides it. At Janney, it happens to be that the parents on the PTA procured that private vendor so that aftercare would be available. They negotiated the contract and pay over the cost of the aftercare that simply passes through them. This is not additional money in public education. Having aftercare available is not an additional resource that other schools in the system do not receive. In fact, having no DCPS provided aftercare actually costs the parents in those schools more because private aftercare is more expensive. No one is looking at the $80 a month or whatever aftercare costs at DCPSs with DCPS provided aftercare and saying "OMG! They raised $80x10x400 kids, wow, that's $320,000 in resources that Title 1 school raised."

The point is to allow comparisons like this:

Janney ES Budget = $700,000 (excl after-school) + $300,000 (fundraised for after school) = $1,000,000 total resources
Title 1 School Budget = $1,000,000 (incl after-school) + $0 fundraised = $1,000,000 total resources

Since the DCPS doesn't publish this data about supplemental resources, it is impossible to say with any certainty about equity, until something like this report comes

No. That is not the comparison. You are being obtuse. $300k is not fundraised for aftercare. People are not donating money to fund aftercare. It is paid by parents who use it for that service. JUST LIKE THE KIDS WHO PAY $80/MONTH AT OTHER SCHOOLS. The budget of an individual school, Title 1 or not does not include aftercare. Aftercare is an entirely separate thing. Not all children use aftercare. It is not included in the per pupil funding given to schools.

DCPS does give schools an OSTP allocation for after-care.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents are letting DCPS off the hook by funding the schools through the PTA. If you want something for your kids, it's a better use of your resources to cut a check to the PTA than to lobby DCPS. DCPS makes it that way.

I come from Massachusetts. There, state law bans PTA's from paying for school expenses. State law also requires equality in funding. So if parents in a rich district want something for their kids, they can't pay for it themselves, and they can't lobby for extra resources for their school district. They have to lobby for extra resources for the entire state education system.

Coincidentally, Massachusetts has the nation's highest average SAT score. (DC is 47th out of 51).

How did the state law get this way? Massachusetts has very powerful teachers unions. The unions pushed for them as a way of increasing school spending.

Massachusetts, the state, doesn't come anywhere close to the poverty of DC. That's the issue- we don't have wealthy suburbs to draw from. Apples to oranges.

Median household income, 2014:
District of Columbia $65,124
Massachusetts $64,859

Per Capita income, 2014:
District of Columbia $45,877ts
Massachusetts $36,593

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income

Interesting!

No, it's not. You can compare Boston to DC, but not DC to Massachusetts this way. Again, apples to oranges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

These PTAs absolutely do this. Many schools collect books at book fairs to help fill shelves in poorer parts of the city and coat drives to fill sister-school requests. There are organizations who's sole purpose is to make the connection between rich and poor PTOs and many of these school participate in this.

Lafayette, for example, has an entire program called Lafayette Gives back, sponsored by the HSA, whose sole purpose is to give, and to teach kids to give, to others. This includes packing backpacks for foster kids, making care packages for first-responders and collecting baby carriers for refugees.

Do you not see how forcing poor kids to rely on the noblesse oblige of the .01% is an enormously fucked up way to fund basic social services such as education?

Huh? People have spent the last 4 pages complaining that rich PTAs should help poor schools. Now, when it comes to light that they do, in fact, help poorer school, it's fucked up? No one is relying on anything or forcing anyone to do anything.

Poor school kids get often X2 the funding as rich school kids.

No, the rich PTAs should help ALL kids. The money should go in a pot and be distributed equally to public schools in the city (not charters). What I object to is using poor (Black and Latino) kids as a "lesson" for rich kids. The poor don't exist to teach a lesson to rich kids, and using them as character building is grotesque. Just fund the schools. Barring that, pool the PTA funds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This does look like sloppy reporting. At our school, we pay the HSA for every field trip. So if 100 students pay $10 each to the HSA to go to the Natural History Museum, it would appear that the HSA "raised" $1000. Then if you figure there are 7 grades and each grade goes on roughly 10 trips a year, it now looks like the HSA raised $70,000. But that is not fundraising, that's me paying for my kid to go on a field trip.

If you didn't pay for the field trip, the field trip would not happen. That's fundraising. The fact that the amount of money raised is equal to the cost of the activity is irrelevant.

It is not fundraising to pay for the cost of a field trip. It is not fundraising for parents to PAY for aftercare for their child just because the HSA/PTA is a conduit for those funds to go to the private provider of aftercare services. The aftercare provider could just as easily accept the funds directly from parents who are paying for care and the HSA would never be involved, it would just be a parent paying for a service.

The HSA is used as a pass-through for the fund to then go directly to pay for the bus or Metro to take the kids to the museum. Would you call it fundraising if instead we paid the school directly for the field trip like when I was a kid?

The CAP study is all about supplemental money in public education—in other words, money on top of what is allocated to schools from the school district. The reason is that traditionally most districts only compare resource equity by comparing school budgets. But if—within a single school district—there is one school that consistently receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in supplemental money from an outside organization, and another school consistently receives zero, and the primary difference between those two schools is race, then there is inequity. The question is, what responsibility, if any, does the school district have to address the inequity?

Your example assumes that every parent has the financial wherewithal to pay for the field trip, so it does not matter whether the money is paid to the PTA or directly to the school, because regardless of which entity receives the money, the trip will happen. Not every parent can afford the field trip, and when those parents are concentrated in a single school, the field trip will not happen. Therefore, the school with parents that can universally afford the field trip are receiving a benefit that another school may not receive.

Fine. Forget field trips.

Aftercare. Aftercare is not provided by DCPS at most (any?) upper NW schools. So a private entity provides it. At Janney, it happens to be that the parents on the PTA procured that private vendor so that aftercare would be available. They negotiated the contract and pay over the cost of the aftercare that simply passes through them. This is not additional money in public education. Having aftercare available is not an additional resource that other schools in the system do not receive. In fact, having no DCPS provided aftercare actually costs the parents in those schools more because private aftercare is more expensive. No one is looking at the $80 a month or whatever aftercare costs at DCPSs with DCPS provided aftercare and saying "OMG! They raised $80x10x400 kids, wow, that's $320,000 in resources that Title 1 school raised."

The point is to allow comparisons like this:

Janney ES Budget = $700,000 (excl after-school) + $300,000 (fundraised for after school) = $1,000,000 total resources
Title 1 School Budget = $1,000,000 (incl after-school) + $0 fundraised = $1,000,000 total resources

Since the DCPS doesn't publish this data about supplemental resources, it is impossible to say with any certainty about equity, until something like this report comes

No. That is not the comparison. You are being obtuse. $300k is not fundraised for aftercare. People are not donating money to fund aftercare. It is paid by parents who use it for that service. JUST LIKE THE KIDS WHO PAY $80/MONTH AT OTHER SCHOOLS. The budget of an individual school, Title 1 or not does not include aftercare. Aftercare is an entirely separate thing. Not all children use aftercare. It is not included in the per pupil funding given to schools.

After school programming is funded as part of DCPS budgets for Title I schools. The district collects copays from income-eligible parents to off-set some, but not all, of the costs. The copays are required as part of the TANF block grant which also helps subsidize after school programming.

Thanks for playing!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

These PTAs absolutely do this. Many schools collect books at book fairs to help fill shelves in poorer parts of the city and coat drives to fill sister-school requests. There are organizations who's sole purpose is to make the connection between rich and poor PTOs and many of these school participate in this.

Lafayette, for example, has an entire program called Lafayette Gives back, sponsored by the HSA, whose sole purpose is to give, and to teach kids to give, to others. This includes packing backpacks for foster kids, making care packages for first-responders and collecting baby carriers for refugees.

Do you not see how forcing poor kids to rely on the noblesse oblige of the .01% is an enormously fucked up way to fund basic social services such as education?

Huh? People have spent the last 4 pages complaining that rich PTAs should help poor schools. Now, when it comes to light that they do, in fact, help poorer school, it's fucked up? No one is relying on anything or forcing anyone to do anything.

Poor school kids get often X2 the funding as rich school kids.

No, the rich PTAs should help ALL kids. The money should go in a pot and be distributed equally to public schools in the city (not charters). What I object to is using poor (Black and Latino) kids as a "lesson" for rich kids. The poor don't exist to teach a lesson to rich kids, and using them as character building is grotesque. Just fund the schools. Barring that, pool the PTA funds.

Amen.

[Anonymous]

TIL that raising $1.4 million dollars for a elementary school in upper NW is the only thing helping them keep pace with all the greedy low-performing Title I schools taking all the resources

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents are letting DCPS off the hook by funding the schools through the PTA. If you want something for your kids, it's a better use of your resources to cut a check to the PTA than to lobby DCPS. DCPS makes it that way.

I come from Massachusetts. There, state law bans PTA's from paying for school expenses. State law also requires equality in funding. So if parents in a rich district want something for their kids, they can't pay for it themselves, and they can't lobby for extra resources for their school district. They have to lobby for extra resources for the entire state education system.

Coincidentally, Massachusetts has the nation's highest average SAT score. (DC is 47th out of 51).

How did the state law get this way? Massachusetts has very powerful teachers unions. The unions pushed for them as a way of increasing school spending.

Massachusetts, the state, doesn't come anywhere close to the poverty of DC. That's the issue- we don't have wealthy suburbs to draw from. Apples to oranges.

Median household income, 2014:
District of Columbia $65,124
Massachusetts $64,859

Per Capita income, 2014:
District of Columbia $45,877ts
Massachusetts $36,593

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income

Interesting!

No, it's not. You can compare Boston to DC, but not DC to Massachusetts this way. Again, apples to oranges.

Not following your logic. The poster above chose to compare DC to Massachusetts test scores and is now showing income data to refute an erroneous claim by a PP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a fan of this practice. At all.

You want parents to donate nothing? Move to MoCo?

MoCo allows PTA donations and some wealthy schools even have set up Foundations that pay for large one-time expenses. But MoCo does not allow any payments for paraprofessionals or aides that DC NW PTAs cover. The National PTA association frowns on paying for staff with PTa funds. Isn't that why Janney has an HSA?

And parents in the upper NW schools that pay for additional school staff get a tax write off for their donations because the parent association is a 501c3.

The point is that DCPS needs to provide a competitive education with the funds it has, or it needs to allow families to supplement the program, or many families will leave. These students are not captive.

No amount of money is going to make the education of one of multiple children who don't share the same father but have the same mother in a community of disorder and low expectations equivalent to the education of the child of two married parents with graduate degrees.

[Anonymous]

And are people proposing that we tax funds raised by private schools and charters as well, and redistribute those? Not sure why one type of family giving is bad and should be shared but others shouldn't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Parents are letting DCPS off the hook by funding the schools through the PTA. If you want something for your kids, it's a better use of your resources to cut a check to the PTA than to lobby DCPS. DCPS makes it that way.

I come from Massachusetts. There, state law bans PTA's from paying for school expenses. State law also requires equality in funding. So if parents in a rich district want something for their kids, they can't pay for it themselves, and they can't lobby for extra resources for their school district. They have to lobby for extra resources for the entire state education system.

Coincidentally, Massachusetts has the nation's highest average SAT score. (DC is 47th out of 51).

How did the state law get this way? Massachusetts has very powerful teachers unions. The unions pushed for them as a way of increasing school spending.

+ 1 to the bolded. DMV is the land of lawyers, lobbyists, politicians...and so there are ways around the school and PTA rules. There is always some loophole that people can adopt.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a fan of this practice. At all.

You want parents to donate nothing? Move to MoCo?

MoCo allows PTA donations and some wealthy schools even have set up Foundations that pay for large one-time expenses. But MoCo does not allow any payments for paraprofessionals or aides that DC NW PTAs cover. The National PTA association frowns on paying for staff with PTa funds. Isn't that why Janney has an HSA?

And parents in the upper NW schools that pay for additional school staff get a tax write off for their donations because the parent association is a 501c3.

The point is that DCPS needs to provide a competitive education with the funds it has, or it needs to allow families to supplement the program, or many families will leave. These students are not captive.

No amount of money is going to make the education of one of multiple children who don't share the same father but have the same mother in a community of disorder and low expectations equivalent to the education of the child of two married parents with graduate degrees.

right, those other DC kids are just dirt kids and don't deserve our $$

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And are people proposing that we tax funds raised by private schools and charters as well, and redistribute those? Not sure why one type of family giving is bad and should be shared but others shouldn't.

DCPS is one LEA, and parent resources should be pooled across it. There's already a DCPS foundation -- the same one that funds the study abroad program, and has brought things like the bicycle initiative to elementary schools. Just direct the parent raised funds there, in addition to the corporate and nonprofit funds DCPS collects.

Each charter is its own LEA. Multi-school charters like KIPP already redistribute funds they raise across their network.

Private schools are private.

All are tax-deductible contributions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents are letting DCPS off the hook by funding the schools through the PTA. If you want something for your kids, it's a better use of your resources to cut a check to the PTA than to lobby DCPS. DCPS makes it that way.

I come from Massachusetts. There, state law bans PTA's from paying for school expenses. State law also requires equality in funding. So if parents in a rich district want something for their kids, they can't pay for it themselves, and they can't lobby for extra resources for their school district. They have to lobby for extra resources for the entire state education system.

Coincidentally, Massachusetts has the nation's highest average SAT score. (DC is 47th out of 51).

How did the state law get this way? Massachusetts has very powerful teachers unions. The unions pushed for them as a way of increasing school spending.

Massachusetts, the state, doesn't come anywhere close to the poverty of DC. That's the issue- we don't have wealthy suburbs to draw from. Apples to oranges.

Median household income, 2014:
District of Columbia $65,124
Massachusetts $64,859

Per Capita income, 2014:
District of Columbia $45,877ts
Massachusetts $36,593

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income

Are you so dense as to suggest that the entire state of Massachusetts, where the median price per square foot for a house is $194K, can be compared in the same way to DC, where the median price per square foot is $435?

I've observed DC politics for over two decades, and there is a persistent theme that I'll call "DC Exceptionalism." It's the opposite of American Exceptionalism, it's the belief that things that work in other places can't work in DC because, well, thing are different here.

If you look at the list of income by state, not only does DC have higher per-capita income than Massachusetts, it has higher per-capita income than every one of the fifty states. We're number one. Yet somehow forty-six states that are poorer than us manage to turn out kids with higher SAT scores. Only Louisiana, Maine, Alabama and West Virginia have lower scores. And somehow, people cling to the belief that the reason is that our city is poor. Our city isn't poor. We have lots of poor people, but we have lots of rich people too. Overall, we're the richest jurisdiction in the country.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents are letting DCPS off the hook by funding the schools through the PTA. If you want something for your kids, it's a better use of your resources to cut a check to the PTA than to lobby DCPS. DCPS makes it that way.

I come from Massachusetts. There, state law bans PTA's from paying for school expenses. State law also requires equality in funding. So if parents in a rich district want something for their kids, they can't pay for it themselves, and they can't lobby for extra resources for their school district. They have to lobby for extra resources for the entire state education system.

Coincidentally, Massachusetts has the nation's highest average SAT score. (DC is 47th out of 51).

How did the state law get this way? Massachusetts has very powerful teachers unions. The unions pushed for them as a way of increasing school spending.

Massachusetts, the state, doesn't come anywhere close to the poverty of DC. That's the issue- we don't have wealthy suburbs to draw from. Apples to oranges.

Median household income, 2014:
District of Columbia $65,124
Massachusetts $64,859

Per Capita income, 2014:
District of Columbia $45,877ts
Massachusetts $36,593

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income

Interesting!

No, it's not. You can compare Boston to DC, but not DC to Massachusetts this way. Again, apples to oranges.

It is apples to apples -- income vs. income, SAT scores vs. SAT scores.

If you were to compare DC vs. Boston, income vs. income, SAT scores vs. SAT scores, it would be even more damning for DC.