Parents Are Going Beyond Bake Sales to Help Support Public Education

By Judy Molland

Funding Fundamentals
In Oregon, parents have been selling their blood plasma to keep teachers working. In Florida, they’re promoting “License for Learning” license plates to raise funds. In Massachusetts, the Lexington Education Foundation has been holding an annual trivia contest to raise money for teacher training and school computers, asking questions like: “Who said, ‘The only thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a horse.’?” (The answer, by the way, is Jacqueline Kennedy.)

The means may be unorthodox, but the end is universal – more money is needed to fund education on both the state and local levels. With federal, state and municipal budgets squeezed to the brink – and with equally strapped taxpayers unwilling to override local revenue limits to help schools meet their operating expenses – parents and education advocates are increasingly taking matters into their own hands.

“The change has occurred over the last two years, ever since the stock market and the high-tech industry went bust, and the states found themselves in tremendous shortfalls,” says Arnold Fege, director of public engagement for the Public Education Network, an organization working to improve public schools. Overall, states have cut their budgets by about $65 billion, and Fege estimates that of that total, between $18 billion and $20 billion represent cuts in education.

“Almost every public school district in the country is affected in some way,” he says.

The result is that where parents were once raising money for the “extras,” they are now fund raising for the basics. P.S. 87 in Manhattan, N.Y., is typical of many schools: “We used to be paying for the frills, the non-essentials,” says Jean Joachim, a parent coordinator who has helped raise more than $200,000 a year at the school for the past decade. “Now the funds pay for items such as the librarian’s salary, half the salary of an administrator, a part-time science consultant, and paraprofessionals in all the kindergarten classes.”