Fundraising gap for Ontario schools

By Kristen Calis, Jessica Cunha, Rosie-Ann Grover and Stephannie Johnson

June 6, 2012

In an affluent neighbourhood in the nation’s capital, a school that the prime minister’s children once attended is flush with cash.
The money comes from serious fundraising that brings in $60,000 just in pizza lunches and a well-attended book fair. Rockcliffe Park Public School — a Kindergarten to Grade 6 school with a large proportion of children from area embassies — does not disclose the total it brings in through fundraising by its heavily involved parents, students and teachers. But school council minutes show it had more than enough to spend $12,000 on hip-hop and drumming sessions for the arts program, a cricket skills tune-up and new equipment for the gym.
Funds from the book fair covered the $5,000 for this year’s author workshop. It brings writers such as Alphabeasts sensation Wallace Edwards, a Governor General’s Award winner, to the school for — as the website puts it — “the extraordinary experience to have the opportunity to converse with an author of a book you have just read and loved!”  Five kilometres away, at Queen Mary Street Public School, celebrated author meet-ups just don’t happen.
This school, where the majority of students are from homes where English is a second language, is lucky if it raises $500 in a year, says Chris Ellis, who sits on four Ottawa school councils.  
Any fundraising proceeds that do come in go to the deficit-ridden milk program or to subsidize field trips for families struggling on an average parent income of $29,000, compared with $155,000 at Rockcliffe Park (figures from the Fraser Institute). An Arabic- and Somali-speaking multicultural liaison officer comes to Queen Mary twice a week.
 “Most of the schools that I’m directly involved with are schools that all struggle to raise funds,” Ellis says. “They’re dealing with communities that don’t have the capacity to raise funds, which is the irony of it; the schools that are most challenged — and you could arguably say have the greatest need for additional resources — are the very schools that find it hard to raise funds.”  
Similar disparities exist across Ontario, where the top 10 per cent of fundraising schools bring in the same amount of money as the bottom 75 per cent combined, according to People for Education’s 2012 report on Ontario’s publicly funded schools.
 “You can see in that way how big the gap is,” says Annie Kidder, executive director of the parent-led organization. Society, not just parents, needs to be concerned with the gap.  “It’s the next generation of society that’s being educated,” she says. “It will have an impact on everybody.”
 It means that schools with the ability to raise large sums can significantly enrich their students’ education with high-tech learning aids such as laptops and SMART Boards. But in many schools, fundraising isn’t just for the frills. It’s for classroom basics such as air conditioning and books or breakfast programs.
A survey of 28 school boards for this Metroland Special Report turned up fundraising gaps as large as half a million dollars between schools in the same board. It also underscored how firmly money from bake sales, car washes and other fundraising has become entrenched in the education system.  
Concern is growing about the overuse of fundraising — and the disparities it creates — at a time when public money is tightening under the McGuinty government’s austerity drive. And despite the province’s introduction last month of the first-ever guidelines for fundraising, there still are no formal rules, in the form of province-wide regulations, to govern the vast amounts of money collected.
In the Parry Sound area, where the average annual income sat at $20,440, in 2005, school fundraising success varies school by school .
For the last two years William Beatty Public School has replaced a collection of small fundraising projects throughout the year with a single, big fundraising event, the Halloween Howl, modeled after Humphrey Public School’s successful MayFest that has been around for more than a decade. Although, raising about $4,000 for a student population of 463, it hasn’t seen the same financial success as MayFest, which raised approximately $10,000 in 2011 to support that school’s 214 students, it’s less work for families and parent council members, said parent council chair Melissa McKeown.
And although new Ministry of Education fundraising guidelines state that schools and parent councils cannot raise money for items that should be covered by the government, McKeown said the parent council has purchased smaller classroom necessities like markers and books; soccer balls and mats for the gym; and outdoor equipment.
“It’s so that the kids have stuff to do at recess, because there isn’t a lot of money in the budget for that,” McKeown said.  “There should be, and that’s why we buy it, because if we don’t, the kids don’t get it. This year we had our Halloween Howl in the fall and raised a bunch of money so we gave half of it to the classrooms. Every classroom got $150 to buy whatever they wanted to buy. Often teachers end up buying (items) out of their own pocket.”
Unlike William Beatty, Nobel School is continuously collecting funds from a number of events like bottle drives, basket raffles, a yard sale and a barbecue at its annual Caverhill Road Race, said Nobel School Advisory chair Corine Green.  
Funds raised have paid for everything from playground sod, to iPads, special assemblies, a graduation lunch and to off-set the cost of class trips.
“If school councils did not provide the money for the extras, there simply would be no extras or parents would be asked to pay for these things,” said Green. “At a small school like ours, staff members are very sensitive to the large number of families who simply cannot afford to be asked to send money to school on a regular basis for things like busing fees, to get to the Stockey Centre or for a class trip.
“On one hand the government pays lip service to tackling obesity and healthy living, but there is very little money for sporting equipment or to pay for buses to attend sporting events,” said Green. “As far as I understand, playground equipment is not on the budget for any school. Repairs to playground equipment have to be covered by fundraisers. As well, schools in outlying areas need to carefully consider participating in any in-town special events, due to the busing fees required, while students in town are able to walk to many of their destinations.
“School councils end up picking up the pieces that have been dropped by the government, just so kids can have something close to the experience afforded by other schools,” continued Green.
Green said the community spirit at smaller schools, like Nobel, helps, and they are not necessarily at a disadvantage when it comes to fundraising, as often the community is prepared to dig a little deeper because of its connection to the school.
“Larger schools have that much more fundraising to do to be able to reach and accommodate the number of students at those schools,” Green said. “We are lucky at our school, in that we have a small group of very dedicated, hard-working school council members and volunteers who know the needs of the students. As a smaller community, I find things get more personal and people are understanding and willing to help. The only time it does seem a little unfair, is when it comes times to pay for a bus, which we cannot even fill due to numbers and yet the cost remains the same. As such, it seems to me that rural schools are at a disadvantage simply because of their location.”
Near North District School Board trustee Jim Beatty, who represents Parry Sounders on the school board, said there is a noticeable discrepancy compared to the wealthier areas in the province  
“There is, for a lack of a better word, discrimination, when you look at areas of the province from areas that are wealthy to the not-so-wealthy,” said Beatty. “I suspect that they’re, from a provincial perspective, trying to provide guidelines for the use of these fundraising monies so that they’re all being used for the same purpose across schools, but how successful they’ll be remains to be seen.”
 The new guidelines, differentiating between what school and community-raised funds can purchase, may be more hindrance to students, Beatty said.
“Up until now, schools themselves that have fundraised, whether it’s (for) soccer balls or gym mats or schools trips, to some extent has been left up to the discretion of the schools,” said Beatty. “If you’re not (allowed) to fundraise for soccer balls, where does the money come from? So you’ve got parents and schools that are determined to make sure that their children receive the very best, not only in education, but in extracurricular activities as well. So they go and set about to do their part, but there’s a limit.”
How much money do Ontario schools fundraise? Many boards don’t want to say. Metroland surveyed 28 English public and Catholic school boards across Ontario and found more than half were reluctant to provide financial information.  Fundraising is a sensitive issue, especially when disclosure of inequities is possible.
Only 11 of the 28 school boards surveyed provided their fundraising total. Fundraising in those boards pumped $26 million into their 788 schools. The remaining 17 boards provided only a broad figure that includes fundraising but is mixed in with other revenue (see chart).
 In boards that provided school-by-school breakdowns, there are significant gaps in money raised. In Halton’s public board, half a million dollars separates White Oaks Secondary in Oakville, which raised $511,000 last year, from Acton District High School, which took in just $8,000. There’s a significant difference in the size of the schools (2,100 at White Oaks; 546 in the small community of Acton) but the Acton school took in proportionally less.
In York, more than $125,000 separates two elementary schools within the same board. St. Clare Catholic School, located in a wealthy Woodbridge neighbourhood, brought in $131,000. In a less affluent area in Markham, St. Francis Xavier Catholic Elementary School raised just $4,000.
Critics, school associations and parents say the need to fundraise is the result of inadequate funding, making it necessary for schools to bulk up on private dollars, sometimes even for the basics.  
“Fundraising is so political. It’s basically a fallout. It’s a symptom of a bigger issue in public education,” says Catherine Fife, president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, which has been calling for a funding model review for a number of years. Education Minister Laurel Broten says Ontario increased education funding to $20.3 billion in the 2010-11 school year, an increase of $6.5 billion — or 45 per cent — since 2003, excluding capital programs.   
“Fundraising proceeds should only be used to complement dollars of public investment to the schools and to the education system,” Broten says. “The Ministry of Education funds directly many programs and investments where we seek to ensure we have an equitable education system; our results are demonstrating that.”
NDP education critic Peter Tabuns says students attending schools with the ability to fundraise large amounts will likely have better music and art classes, more computers and school trips.
“You’ll see a richer educational experience for the children, and for the schools that have no money, things will be tighter,” Tabuns says. “They will have less access to computers, to textbooks, what we see as integral or important parts of a good, solid education.”  
More opportunities come with the requirement for more money. And some schools don’t want to share. Bayview Hill Elementary’s school council, fearful of an initiative forcing them to share the wealth generated, discussed a strategy at a school council meeting on Nov. 28, 2011.
The minutes posted on their website state, “We have an opening balance of $142,000 from last year, and we must use this money before the province moves to leveling the playing field and distributes the money amongst other schools.”
Co-chair of the school council Wendy Steinberg credits the 800 students, dedicated parent volunteers and successful weekly pizza lunches for the school’s successful fundraising numbers.
“We’re all for inclusivity and diversity,” she says, “but we worked hard for that money.”
 Steinberg feels the money should stay within the Bayview Hill community in York Region where the average parent income at the school is $117,800.
In less affluent pockets of the province, families just don’t have the money to rally around expensive fundraising projects.
At Bennetto School in Hamilton, where parents make $18,400, there isn’t any additional money floating around. Their primary focus is the breakfast program to make sure students have food to start the day.
“I get mixed feelings when I think about students in different parts of the same board having different opportunities based on what is raised through parent fundraising,” says Greg Reader, president of the school council for this north end community, historically considered to be on the “wrong side of the tracks.”
“It’s obviously a problem,” says Greg Weiler, Waterloo local president, Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario. “The whole premise of having a publicly funded system is that the opportunities you have for learning and the type of learning you’re able to experience shouldn’t depend on the school you are at or the community you live in.”