A long stewed-over plan to restrict the ability of Portland Public Schools parents to raise money to add educators at their own child’s school has been put on ice, again.
At a forum at Portland Public Schools headquarters Wednesday evening, it became abundantly clear that there was not enough common ground to change the policy on parent fundraising for the 2023-2024 school year.
A longstanding district policy permits parents to raise money to help their child’s school but requires them to share about a third of it with other, needier schools. Some advocates for reform have called for a full ban on private fundraising for staff.
Sensing the impasse, school board member Gary Hollands floated an entirely new approach:
The next time the district asks voters to approve its local option levy, last OK’d in November 2019 to raise about $100 million a year and fund approximately 800 teachers, it should ask for a small raise in that rate, Hollands suggested.
Hiking the levy to raise about $8 million more per year, he said, would give principals at every school roughly $100,000 in no-strings-attached funds to target the greatest needs at their school. (A similar grant was made this school year using pandemic relief money; it will repeat next year before that funding source expires.)
Principals could choose to fund a reading specialist, tutors, classroom aides or another role. But under Hollands’ proposal, if a school were to raise $100,000 from families and alumni on its own, it would forfeit its share of the levy money, which would then go back into the common pot for redistribution to other schools.
His plan — which is likely to face pushback from other school board members — would allow wealthier schools to keep 100% of whatever they raise, including above $100,000.
But it is contingent upon voters agreeing to re-up the local option levy in November 2024, school board chair Andrew Scott pointed out. Historically, Portland voters have supported the school district’s property tax requests, but enrollment has been dwindling since the pandemic and Multnomah County appears to be losing population at a worrisome clip.
Under the current system, schools in wealthier, typically whiter enclaves with foundations that are able to raise significant sums via auctions and jog-a-thons can keep the first $10,000 that they raise. After that, they must give one-third of their fundraising totals to the district’s Fund for Portland Public Schools, which then redistributes that money to schools without foundation support.
That results in a small handful of schools — among them Lincoln High and Duniway and Bridlemile elementary schools — getting to keep upwards of $130,000, enough to fund an extra teacher, plus perhaps an aide. By contrast, spillover grants distributed by the Fund for PPS top out at $15,000 per school.
Critics say that’s an inherently unethical system that allows wealthier communities to insulate themselves from the brunt of any budget cutbacks and robs them of the impetus to join in lobbying for more state funding for the entire public school system.
Foundation supporters counter that every school, regardless of its demographics, serves children with high needs. They also point out that the district’s equity-focused budget directs significantly significantly more dollars per student to schools that serve larger concentrations of high needs students, allowing them to hire more educators and keep class sizes lower.
For example, the district is spending $16,149 per student this year at Rosa Parks Elementary School, where there is no foundation, versus $7,032 at Richmond Elementary School, where there is a foundation.
The topic has been batted around for at least the last six years in Portland, without any significant action taken. Previous proposals — to raise the amount that schools would have to give to the common pot to 50% or to require that schools using foundation money to pay for extra staff make sure that those educators focus on helping children who are furthest behind — ran into walls of opposition from both sides.
Foundation supporters said that such limits would leave their donors less willing to give and more likely to seek private school alternatives while opponents say that if there must be private fundraising, it should all go to a districtwide foundation system.
— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com
