Reply to Janney PTA raised $1.4 million in one year

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Reply to "Janney PTA raised $1.4 million in one year"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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? [/quote]

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 [b]another school consistently receives zero[/b], 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.

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It simply isn't true that the other schools receive zero on top of the DCPS budget. They get more from DCPS, and they get a ton of outside grands, partnerships, etc. that are not available to the 5 schools in the article. Where is the article on all the money and resources allocated to those schools? look at the DCPS profiles and the lists of activities and resources even the poorest schools are getting. Who is paying for all of that? So the five schools in the article make up the difference by making the parents pay out of pocket for their free public education.

Funding inequity favors at risk youth and Title I schools, particularly the 40 lowest performing schools. If DC changed its law to mirror Massachusetts in this regard, it would favor the wealthier schools. As it is, wealthy parents will not push for funding equity, which would take funds away from at risk youth. Also, lobbying for something district wide will never inure to the benefit of wealthy kids because DCPS is expressly focused on the neediest kids and schools, and will be for the foreseeable future. Instead, they fill in the gaps in their giant schools through fundraising. And by and large they are not providing things that are not available to kids at other schools. Look at the items cited in the article:

art teacher: most other DCPS schools have arts partnerships for low income schools and additional funding for arts through at risk allocations, see also https://dcps.dc.gov/page/art-dance-drama-music-and-visual-arts

classroom aides: most other DCPS schools are significantly smaller with small teacher:student ratios, plus they have additional support staff through at risk funding and title I funding. Quite frankly, DCPS should provide additional staff when there are 120 kids in a single grade, but they don't.

school trips: again, at risk funding, partnerships, grants, Proving What's Possible grants, and the like pay for this at other schools

additional instructional coaches: I actually don't think PTAs pay for this

after-school programs: this is a pass through -- parents are paying for this service out of pocket if they choose to use it -- it is not a PTA subsidy; no different than sending your kids to private karate class after school at your own expense; but in other DCPS schools, after care is provided by DCPS, plus 54 schools have OSTP, and there are partnerships with law firms, DC Scores, Food Corps, etc, available for enrichment to low income schools.

I'd like to see an article on all the outside support DCPS is getting to make the education experience better for kids at schools other than these five. There is a lot of going going on.

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No, I don't believe for a second what you are saying.  EOTP schools in DC are not as well funded as Janney, in terms of their needs.  [/quote]

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