A bit of a disparity in private fundraising for Boston public schools

How would the district get authority to effectively seize money from private nonprofits? These were funds given voluntarily to specific nonprofits, at times for specific purposes.

I get the point of this report—there should be equal funding for all schools—but this particular solution seems unworkable.

Actually, I stopped giving years ago when I realized Latin might actually have enough. It doesn't mean however I want my donations to be forcibly shared with Another Course To College or the Academy of Retail Cashiering.

Nevertheless, we have a well designed website with no names attached to it. No disclosure of funding on who underwrites the organization, no members board, nothing. This is kabuki.

There have been 20 shares on the Facebook page as of this morning. Of the 5 people who shared it and a few more people who like it, guess where they all live? It's not Roxbury, Dorchester, Allston, Brighton, Mattapan, Charlestown, East Boston, or South Boston. They all come from the Can't Afford Cambridge Corridor of JP and Roslindale. You know the place where everything should be equitable except when you sell your condo for a huge profit.

Vermont had an issue about 20 years ago with "Gold Towns" being forced to pay higher taxes to underwrite poorer towns and their school districts. That was public money. Like Ashland getting a cut of Dover's money to put towards schools. This is different. This is private money, which has been growing for decades, and in Latin's case, for centuries. By the way, Boston Arts Academy has an endowment of $15,230 per pupil and it is only 24 years old? Good for them.

You can't take my money ye Daughters of Bella Luna and use it your way because you don't think it is fair. Life is not fair. Welcome to the show.

Our Class President died of cancer at age 36. He was a great guy. Very subtle but very determined and would have made a great Mayor of Boston someday. He was involved in public service and was a person who would go far. He was also gay and African American, not some stereotypical evil fourth or fifth generation West Roxbury Irish American kid that somehow everyone thinks is the population of Latin.

After the shock of his death, a good number of our class got together and decided to endow a scholarship in his name. The money, which let's put it this way is about the total income of two people making the prevailing retail wage in the city for the year, earns enough just return that we can underwrite a person to be placed in a summer internship between their junior and senior year in a City, State, or Federal office in town. This gives them a great item on their application to get into an upper echelon college over let's face it; rich suburban kids with resources.

We get a lot of candidates. All with excellent resumes and academic records. A few of us still have tacit bias and try to steer it towards the kid who comes from a background like a lot of us; immigrant or second generation kids from neighborhoods that don't make the tourism brochures but make the if it bleeds it leads section of the news.

That is what Latin's endowment does.

And these people want to take it? No way.

the BLS number is a huge red flag that the data is “off.” What’s the point of showing numbers down to the dollar when you’re commingling endowment principal with an unspecified year’s annual fund. Yes, Latin has access to funds by virtue of their endowment, but they can’t just liquidate it.

I get what the point of the report is—advocate for increased and equal funding for all schools rather than leave it to the contingencies of whichever schools have a nonprofit fundraising for them and how successful that fundraising is—but this particular chart helps skew that argument.

Brookline a few years back had a group that wanted to donate a large sum of money to help fund either a new auditorium or theatre program at the Runkle Elementary School. The Town said no, you can’t donate money to one school that’s inherently imbalanced and would obviously result in unequal educational opportunities throughout the school system (or that was the premise behind the denial). Whether or not Brookline has this written into their policies or not is a different story.

To be fair I don’t remember the entire story, and it could have been simply that the money could not be used for capital projects which could be the same for BLS and the BPS as well.

...other than addressing admission inequities, which is being worked on.

given the events of the last few months. and the passive voice — being worked on — to boot.

my kid is not BPS age, let alone BLS age so i don’t really have a lot of expertise in the area. but, it would seem to me that “admission inequities” would be a major factor in the cycle of private giving.

I have no expertise in this either, but I wonder if lack of money is the biggest issue. BPS spent $23k per student in 2019 -compared to the state average of $17k.

https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/ppx.aspx

yet it’s shown up twice so far on this post

The donors don't donate to the schools. They donate to charitable foundations whose existence is to give grants to the schools.

Way, way back in the day, a guy I knew through other people who was an alumnus of English High School gave a big donation to his old school. English had enough alums who have done okay (Leonard Nimoy jumps out) that they should have been able to establish an endowment of some sort, yet they aren't even on the chart. Kind of sad.

Really?

Do you know the foundation that is underwriting the Globe "coverage" of the BPS, has an endowment of $1.175 billion and is bullying the city into their idea of what is fair?

Did you know the people behind the foundation had three teenagers living on Beacon Hill and sent their precious little ones to Milton Academy and other Prep Schools and not Boston Public Schools?

The Globe is beyond biased in this affair.

Let's not listen to really rich people telling us peasants what is good for us. They don't want us coming for their power and wealth. They would rather divide and conquer and keep their position a the top of the pyramid. Thanks,

The most gifted and well resourced get siphoned off by Andover, Exeter, Choate, NMH, Milton Academy, etc., or they go to high school in Brookline, Sudbury, Dover, etc. The ones who end up at the exam schools are the kids of middle- and upper-middle-class families, along with some from poor/immigrant families where the parent(s) understand the value brought by the exam school education and name.

The ultimate problem with splitting the gifted and talented kids among all the city high schools is that ultimately there aren't enough resources to offer the same set of educational choices which will give those kids a strong foundation for college. Ignoring Latin, do you think there are enough interested kids at each school to offer 4 years of Chinese, French, German, Italian, or Spanish? How about AP Chemistry or Physics? Or BC Calculus? And there's a lot of value to the smart kids in having others around them who will challenge them academically -- that's what they're going to face at a selective college or university.

I mean, we could make the same argument about Harvard and MIT -- they "perpetuate inequality and simply siphon off the most gifted and well resourced students from everywhere else. The kicker is that it's not the [universities] that make these students successful. But removing them from the other schools does harm the remaining students, who then are further under-resourced and suffer from the burden of low expectations." So Harvard and MIT students should instead be going to community college in their home towns/states in the name of equity.