Parental fundraising to supplement public schools: examples from Denver and Chicago

There are so many pertinant issues discussed in today's article from the Craine's Chicago Business Journal about urban schools. It also gives me a number of great leads and contacts in the Windy City for my upcoming visit. Thank you to my good friend Catherine in Chicago for the great tip!

"Slowdown in home sales means parents face questions about city schools"

The major point highlighted in the title is that there are people that bought into urban real estate (condos, townhomes, etc) before they had children; then they had children but figured they'd sell and move to better school districts. However, now they cannot, or don't want to, sell their home/condo/townhome for such a discounted price due to the downturn in the economy. This puts them in the sticky situation of being stuck with navigating the public school system. In Chicago, according to the article, there are at least two consulting services that help parents do just that: navigate the web of choice schools and gifted and talented testing and option schools and lottery applications. I hope to speak with them both on my visit later this summer.

Another interesting discussion in the article is about South Loop Elementary School. "In 2002, just 33 percent of students were passing the state achievement tests. Within three years, it was 80 percent, eventually rising to 95 percent." How? Redrawing the district had something to do with it, but so did the parental involvement and supplemental fundraising for the school. It isn't just any public elementary school that can raise $50,000 at a black-tie gala. As the article notes, this raises questions about duplicating the success at schools with predominantly low-income families.

As the article notes, "To be sure, South Loop benefited form a shift in boundaries that ended busing from a nearby housing project that later was demolished. Half the students are African-American, and 9 percent are Hispanic. (Overall, CPS is 42 percent black and 44 percent Hispanic.) The percentage of low-income students dropped from 91 percent to 37 percent in three years. But test scores improved across the board even before the new, affluent students had taken the tests,"

The non-profit Friends & Family of South Loop School notes that "donations collected by Friends & Family  are used to upgrade or augment the school's resources beyond what is provided in the basic CPS budget."

This situation reminds me of Bromwell Elementary School in Denver that benefits from overwhelming parental involvement and fundraising. It also helps their cause that they are surrounded by an very affluent neighborhood. They hold an annual auction, which sounds similar to that of South Loop.

According to Bromwell's website "Every year at Bromwell, the PTA makes a grant to help pay for classroom paraprofessionals and specials teachers. Unfortunately, the money we receive from DPS does not come close to covering our kids’ rich curriculum and classroom paras, with a disparity of approximately $550 per student. Money raised by the PTA (Annual Fund and Auction) seeks to bridge that gap and also insulate our kids from deep system-wide budget cuts making headlines in recent years."

Both South Loop School and Bromwell Elementary highlight the power of parental involvement and external fundraising in neighborhood public schools, but how do you replicate this success outside of very affluent neighborhoods?