Equity Questions in School-Based Fundraising Still Fester

NPQ began to look at the question of the potential inequities perpetuated by fundraising for individual schools a number of years ago as one aspect of the larger topic of private money in public systems. Beth Gazley’s 2015 article, “How Philanthropy Props up Public Services and Why We Should Care,” digs deeply into the dynamics. Parents want what is best for their children, and that extends to raising funds for their children’s schools to cover things such as field trips, extracurricular activities, scholarships, teacher workshops even scholarships for student trips overseas. But what happens when the distribution of wealth in a community, a city, or a school district is uneven, where some schools have parents who can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and others find raising $100 a stretch? To imagine the generosity a parent feels toward his or her own child’s school extends to those of other children may be wishful thinking. Or, it may be that there is a learning curve for parents to get to a place where raising funds for schools whose parents have less fiscal capacity than they do is a part of their ethos.In a well-researched article in the Washington Post, Kitson Jazynka takes a hard look at parents and PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) and PTA (Parent Teacher Association) fundraising in the Washington, D.C. schools, including the schools (some of the more affluent ones) that her own children attend or attended.