I do think this is sloppy reporting, and I really don't care how much a PTA raises in different schools... I get that as a parent you are willing to donate more to a school if it directly impacts your child.

That being said, I would think with a budget as high as some of these schools have, perhaps they could make a small effort to help schools with much smaller PTO budgets. The success of the district as a whole should matter to these schools, even if the number one priority is their own population.

For one, many of these "poorer" schools are extremely inexperienced with fundraising, what works, what doesn't, etc. Reaching out to "mentor" a developing PTO would be so appreciated by schools. Offering advice, maybe a connection or two, sharing information, etc. Maybe developing a "Sister PTO" relationship. Its not just about the money. These schools are struggling just to figure out how to run a PTO, let alone how to raise money.

And if we want to get into the money, perhaps the wealthier PTO's could fund a small grant for other PTO's in the district. Offering a couple $500-$1000 grants a year to other district PTO's for a worthy cause. It would make such a difference to those school's budgets and would make a small impact on the wealthier school budgets.

I just think there are ways that wealthier schools could use a small portion of their resources for the greater good without negatively impacting their own budgets.

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.

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.

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?

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

You want parents to donate nothing? Move to MoCo?

Does anyone know how much Brent pta made this year?

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."

Anonymous wrote:The Janney PTA has a nice website outlining their budget,
https://www.janneyschool.org/pta/pta-budget/, which would answer a number of the concerns raised in the WaPo article if they thought to google.

I mean...that they didn't look at this is appalling. And I am not a Janney parent.

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.

Good grief you are dense. Teachers always account for the kids who cannot pay- as they always have. Do you think a kid's field trip is exactly $15? No it's not. But the teacher asks for $15 per kid which will also cover the costs of the poorer kids who cannot pay. Again, the PTA is JUST A PASS THROUGH. It's not covering the costs of anything-- the teacher has already factored that in.

The other benefit of this system is that the teacher knows from the start of the year how much they have to work with. If the 1st grade has only collected enough for a zoo field trip and not an outing to Mt. Vernon, then to the zoo they go.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I dont begrudge those schools. Title 1 schools may raise significantly less but they also get more govt dollars. Either way, the real heart of this is the commitment from parents. You could throw 1 mil at the worst performin elem in DC and I am not sure the test scores are going to jump all that much. It all comes down to what the parents are giving to the kids OUTSIDE of school unfortunately. And 1 million dollars isn't going to help that much.

This is the same argument as saying that political donations do not equal influence. If big donors—to schools or politicians—weren't getting a return on their investment, they wouldn't donate the money. You can argue about the degree to which they're getting a return, but saying the return is nonexistent is silly.

What a strange comparison. The PP is right that the money at a school's disposal has very little to do with the achievement gap. Besides, as others have pointed out, schools like Janney receive significantly less in public funds than schools serving a poorer population, so the parents have to make up for it.

A school with at risk students gets about $2,000 more per at risk student. Not that much actually.

There is a lot more nuance going into school budgets from DCPS than allocated $ for at risk students.

The Janney PTA has a nice website outlining their budget,
https://www.janneyschool.org/pta/pta-budget/, which would answer a number of the concerns raised in the WaPo article if they thought to google.

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 question is whether the field trip would happen if the HSA weren't involved at all. The involvement of the HSA suggests that it wouldn't.

The PTA never organized field trips when I was kid. The teachers did. How do I know that? My mother was a teacher in my school system. Schools all over the country have field trips that are not organized by the PTA (parents!). Parents at our school do not organize the field trips. Teachers do based on their lesson plans. Using the HSA to collect the money and pay it out is simply a convenience. It could be done the old-fashioned way of the teacher collecting $10 from each student, turning it over to the school admins who then have to cut a check, but I suspect it's not done that way because DCPS is one big school system and I would guess there isn't a bank account for each school in the same way there was in the town I grew up in which had one elementary, one middle and one high school.

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.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And if they'd returned calls from the Post they could have explained that.

Do you know that the post called? I heard one pta pres got an email only 2 hours before the deadline asking for comment. Not much lead time for a volunteer with a full time job. Its clear the reporter did not want facts to get in the way of a good story.

One of the things in the article that surprised me was that not one HSA/PTA returned the call from the Post. If they called everyone with such a short window I'm no longer surprised. These people are volunteers many with full time jobs

The system that they have in Oregon - where the schools that raise more money have to contribute to a community grant program to fund schools with less money - it would be interesting to see how that played here; I don't imagine it would go over very well.

So given that Janney starts with less money per student from DCPS, would other schools need to fund Janney with community grants?

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 question is whether the field trip would happen if the HSA weren't involved at all. The involvement of the HSA suggests that it wouldn't.

Sure it would. It would just be a PITA-- the kids would have to come in with their $15 or whatever each time there was a trip planned. The way this works means that parents pay once at the beginning of the year and then don't have to deal anymore. Like the Aftercare, it's just a pass through.