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][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 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.

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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."[/quote]

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  [/quote]

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.

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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! [/quote]

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