Way back in March, SchoolBook asked parents to help us report on a growing phenomenon in the city's schools: the rising cost of a public education.
With a post, "Pay to the Order of Public School X," and a query, "How much have you spent this year on your child's school or school-related activities?" we invited readers to participate in a journalistic method called crowd-sourcing: you give us information, and we follow through with reporting to provide facts, context, explanations and reactions.
You did: Hundreds of you came forward with information related to your spending on your child's public-school education.
And we did: You can find the catalog of articles related to the topic "Paying for Public School" here, with additional related reports appearing in The New York Times and on WNYC (which jointly produce SchoolBook).
Together we captured a growing sense that the burden of providing some programs and supplies in public schools has been shifting to parents.
As Sarah Jacobs commented on March 19:
There hasn't been a year that my kids have been in NYC public school that I have not been given a large shopping list, not just for supplies for my child's personal use but for supplies for the classroom. Art supplies, paper towels, hand sanitizer, hand soap, reams of paper, pens, pencils, rugs for the class room have all been on the list. Additionally, teachers spend their own money for class supplies when the parents can't afford to help out. This is in addition to various fund-raisers that take place over the course of the school year. PTAs often bridge the gap between the spartan budget and what schools would like to provide for the kids.
Parents reported being asked to shell out hundreds of dollars for school trips. They noted the constant pressure to sell candy and contribute to bake sales. And some said there was an expectation in some schools that parents would donate $1,000, even $1,200, to their school's PTA to keep staffing up and programs in operation.
But as Alexander Schwarz pointed out in a comment a few days later:
New York State spends more on education than any other state in the nation, with New Jersey and Connecticut very close behind.
Keep this in mind when you hear about "five rounds of budget cuts," "staffing cut to the bone" and the like. Much of this, while painful, is tinged with some degree of political rhetoric.
Mr. Schwarz is right. As Anna M. Phillips reported in June:
For parents being asked to pitch in, it might be difficult to believe, but school spending has risen every year under the Bloomberg administration.
However, so have costs, especially in special education and transportation. To make ends meet, city officials have set a less ambitious agenda for school construction projects, eliminated planned raises of four percent for teachers, and reduced individual schools’ budgets as many as five times over the last several years.
And individual schools appear to be increasingly turning to parents.
As our reporting found, the trend is being fed by many parents' willingness to pitch in. Fund-raising has grown enormously, fed by middle-class parents who are sticking with the public school system and are raising unheard-of amounts for their children's schools. As Kyle Spencer reported in the Metropolitan section of The New York Times in June about million-dollar PTAs:
PTAs are permitted to pay for substitutes, aides, enrichment teachers and assistants, which many of the city's wealthiest PTAs do readily. This year, the PTA at P.S. 199 on the Upper West Side spent close to $100,000 on a science and technology teacher. And PTAs at P.S. 6 and the Anderson School spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on teaching assistants to buffer students from the ballooning class sizes caused by budget cuts. Assistant teachers work with students on reading and writing, help with class projects and sometimes do lunch duty or bathroom patrol, depending on the school.
But the financing goes beyond the classroom. At P.S. 290, the PTA has helped to pay for trips, including an overnight for fourth graders to a nature center in the Catskills.
At P.S. 6, the PTA and its alumni foundation have helped defray the cost of a rooftop ecology center with an 800-square-foot greenhouse and a turtle pond.
And in recent years, at P.S. 199, the PTA has financed sundry enrichment classes, automatic toilet flushers and September bedbug detection for every classroom. Last year, the school raised close to $500,000.
Principals at these schools say their parents' associations do more than collect money: they work in tandem with the administration throughout the year to come up with monetary solutions, routinely swapping items from one budget to the other so that principals can use money for full-time staff while the PTA covers the expenses allowed by the Education Department.
Ms. Spencer noted:
In a system where many parents' associations raise no money at all, these schools have earned a special name among parents and school consultants: "public privates."
"Many now have amenities that can compete with private-school offerings," said Emily Glickman, the president of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, a private-school admissions company, on the Upper East Side.
Even as they complained about the rising costs, some commenters noted that these elite schools were still cheaper than private schools.
Other parents said that was not the point. The equity issues that have emerged in the wake of these vast fund-raising machines (captured by Ms. Spencer in a SchoolBook post looking at two schools at different ends of the economic spectrum), are real and growing.
Anna Phillips noted the inequities in her SchoolBook post about school budgets:
In Lower Manhattan and Park Slope, Brooklyn, weathering the last several years of austerity has looked very different from the experience of schools in Harlem and Corona, Queens.
While wealthier schools have increased class sizes and cut back on activities like school plays and overseas trips, many hold lavish fund-raising events and galas so they can continue to offer the arts programs and after-school events that attract families who can afford private schools.
Poorer schools have cut course offerings, particularly in subjects like health, the arts and foreign language. In some cases, they have replaced the classes with online courses. Many have also laid off school aides, parent coordinators and other support staff members; this school year, 716 people in total lost their jobs.
Meanwhile, after a drop in financing, the city raised the eligibility requirements for schools to receive extra funding based on their students’ poverty levels.
One parent who has devoted countless hours to supporting her children's schools expressed misgivings, as well as concerns that all of the private fund-raising was letting the government off the hook. As Natalie Green Giles wrote in a Viewpoint post:
The embarrassment of riches in the coffers of the elite public schools is inadvertently codifying harmful public policy. Upper-middle-class parents have become the worst enablers of city and state governments that have repeatedly shortchanged our children, our teachers, our schools and our broader public school communities.
We, the more educated, more vocal and more politically connected public school parent population, have been allowing the government to relinquish its legislated responsibility for providing an adequate education to our children by masking the damage done by years of budget cuts.
Beth Fertig of WNYC noted that oversight of this PTA fund-raising and spending was minimal:
It’s an open secret that parent associations in many of the city’s well-heeled neighborhoods in effect buy staff members whom their schools couldn’t afford on their own. But it’s been difficult to determine the extent of this spending because the Department of Education tracks only a sliver of parent fund-raising and spending.
However, documents obtained by WNYC and SchoolBook show that at least 40 schools across New York City were able to pay for bigger staffs last year with money from parent groups. The list highlights the difference parents can make in providing services at the public schools during a time of budget cuts.
As expected, many of the 40 schools are in wealthy neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn where community members are able to step in to provide the kinds of programs common in suburban districts. But the list also includes schools in upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Queens. In more modest enclaves of Staten Island and Queens, parents raised a few thousand dollars for part-time band teachers.
It also shows how little the Department of Education can regulate parent groups, because some have long-standing tax-exempt organizations and pay for part-time school staff members directly, enabling them to fly under the department’s radar.
The city schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, said in an interview that he recognized the equity issues, but hesitated to reel in parent fund-raising:
I don’t want to penalize those that have the ability to raise money to support their schools. If anything, I want to support schools that may not have that capacity for a host of different reasons — to make them smarter and aware of how to do that so they’re able to enhance what’s taking place in their schools. So as long as they’re meeting their legal or chancellor requirements, then I’m fine with that. I think our goal is to provide the appropriate support.
And parents themselves said they should have the right to expend their effort — and their money — in support of their children's schools.
Some spurned a model, in operation in Portland, Ore., that shares parent fund-raising throughout the district. In Portland, Lillian Mongeau reported for SchoolBook:
"Parents could have private foundations for their children’s schools. But 30 cents of every dollar raised after the first $10,000 must be passed on to the citywide foundation. From that pool of money, the foundation disburses grants" to more needy schools.
In response to a SchoolBook query, "Do you think that schools that raise a lot of money should have to share with schools that don't?," Robin Tempelman commented:
I'm not sure that Portland has it right — have the schools raised less or more money since the change? I can only think that I'd be less inclined to give money to schools in general rather than my own child's school in particular.
And Thomas Rice commented:
There is nothing wrong or inappropriate with concerned parents raising supplemental funds for the schools their children attend, and there should be no obligation for those schools to share that money with other districts. That sharing takes place already in the form of taxes. Parent should not be told that cannot contribute to their children's schools as a supplement without being further taxed.
I recall that we still live a free country where individuals do have choice to make fundamental decisions — like what they spend on their child's education.
But Steven Levine commented:
Portland absolutely has it right. Unless someone can figure out how to create an effective fundraising plan for a Brownsville, Brooklyn, school to help it raise a similar level of funds as an Upper East Side school, then we need some kind of equity mechanism. Better yet, we should be using taxes to fund our schools, not individual contributions. Education has to be a societal responsibility, not merely a way of benefiting a particular child, school or neighborhood.
Matt from Hell's Kitchen, responding to a segment of The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC devoted to school fund-raising, said he had mixed feelings:
My daughter’s starting kindergarten next year, and we’ve been doing a lot of research, touring a lot of schools, and we’ve been absolutely shocked at the disparity, and it is due to the PTAs. ... I think maybe the thing to do is to have a fund where a percentage of what the PTA gives goes to a general fund that is then redistributed equally.
Asked by Mr. Lehrer if he would be willing donate, say, $150 to a fund to help poorer PTAs, Matt said that wouldn’t discourage him:
I’m going to give because I want my daughter to have the best education she could have, but I also — I really feel strongly that it needs to be more fair.
Other suggestions emerged from that Brian Lehrer segment, which featured Ms. Spencer discussing her million-dollar-PTA story.
One listener calling from Darien, Conn., said her town had a cap on the amount of PTA money each school could spend per student. But Ms. Spencer said that probably would not work in New York, where many wealthy parents are opposed to such a measure.
Another listener, Ray from Harlem, who said his wife was a public school teacher, called in with an idea similar to the Portland model: “If a wealthy school brings in more than, say, $500,000,” he suggested, “then they partner up with a school that’s not so wealthy and 10 percent of it goes to other school.”
But another caller, Elizabeth from Brooklyn, who said she had been a PTA president for the past two years, had some reservations:
You know, on the one hand, I think it would be better to pool all our money. On the other hand, I don’t really trust — to be perfectly honest, I don’t really trust the D.O.E. to administer this fairly. They’re the ones who have sort of created this system.
But one commenter, reacting online to the Lehrer report, had a different perspective. The commenter, Kate, said that she attended P.S. 98, the Douglaston School, in Queens until 1953, and that her mother, who served as PTA president, paid for curtains, books for the school library and tools for the school’s garden.
"When I read this article I thought, ‘How elitist, how reactionary, how undemocratic,’” she wrote, “and then I remembered."
Readers (and listeners): Thanks for your opinions, ideas and the information that seeded our reports on this subject. We invite you to continue to inform our reporting by responding to the new query below.
And many thanks to the following SchoolBook, WNYC and New York Times journalists for their hard work on this topic — Kyle Spencer, Anna M. Phillips, Beth Fertig, Elbert Chu, Chris Palmer, Theodoric Meyer, Hiten Samtani, Yasmeen Khan, Patricia Willens, Brian Lehrer and Karen Frillmann — and to Natalie Green Giles for her smart Viewpoint.