From the Magazine | Education

Why Schools Are Passing the Hat

By ELLIE MCGRATH

Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 1983
Neighborhood fund raising keeps quality in the classroom

Florence Phillips, 46, is a professional Florence Phillips, 46, is a professional actress with a very special audience: the students in the Cos Cob School in Connecticut. As the school's artist-in-residence, she flies through fairy tales, acts out scenes from Shakespeare and introduces the youngsters to the poetry of Whitman, Shelley and Tennyson. From parents she gets a standing ovation. Last month the Cos Cob PTA held a fund-raising party with 1,000 guests paying $1 a head. Reason: the local school budget does not cover her salary, and the PTA must raise $3,000 a year to keep Phillips in the classroom. The parents are happy to get involved, says Principal Dominic Butera, because they get "very excited when they listen to their children reading and reciting great works of poetry."

Such unorthodox private support of everything from teachers' salaries to new computers is on the rise in the U.S. as the question of who will pay for public schools becomes ever more complex. Local property taxes once were the chief source of public school funding. But a series of court decisions over the past decade decreed that this method inevitably led to inequity: schools in well-to-do districts were qualitatively better than those in poor areas. Instead, since 1980, states have provided nearly 50% of schools' public funds, while the rest comes from local and Federal governments. Tax revolts have even further reduced local revenues. One result is that more and more school districts are trying to supplement their budgets by passing hats instead of raising taxes.

Across the country, private aid to public schools is now running between $1 billion and $2 billion a year, estimates Hayden Smith of the Council for Financial Aid to Education. That compares with more than $116 billion in government support in the last school year. The money is coming from energetic, well-heeled PTAs, from local education foundations and from corporate donors. Although the schools welcome this new source of needed revenue, some educators wonder if the trend will reinforce the imbalance between affluent and poor districts.

Certainly, in middle-class communities, parents are flocking to help out their schools. PTA membership jumped by 70,000 in the past school year, reversing a 20-year decline. Washington State PTA President Mary Ann Laramore notes that four years ago, $3,000 was considered a big budget for a PTA, but today "we're seeing budgets of $10,000 to $12,000." The Smoke Rise Elementary School in the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain boasts a lab with 14 Apple II computers, 13 of which were bought by the PTA. The Lafayette parent group in Washington, B.C., which raises $40,000 a year from such projects as a flea market and an international-food festival, not only supports the salaries of a nurse and two teachers but pays for science equipment and library books. At Columbia Elementary School in DeKalb County, Ga., where 40% of students receive free or reduced-price lunches, parents have managed to raise $2,000 a year to buy equipment, including a computer.

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From the Dec. 5, 1983 issue of TIME magazine
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