20 Steps for Major Fund Rasing in Public Schools

Overview: Parental involvement is the most common form of "giving" at the school level but other contributors can play a significant role in providing support to schools. A majority of schools rely on parents, local businesses, corporations, and community-based organizations for support. Although not as prevalent across schools, students, philanthropic foundations, community members, professional associations, and city governments are givers (and often donate gifts of significant size).

The challenge of building new schools and modernizing existing ones offers the opportunity to enhance teaching and learning, and to strengthen communities at the same time. By initiating a thoughtful, inclusive school facilities planning process, school districts can incorporate diverse points of view, take advantage of the power and creativity of parent and business partnerships, enlist widespread community funding support, and create high performance schools that serve both students and their communities.

There is no precise formula for making this all happen, but the following 19 steps-and the action checklists that accompany them-provide the basics.

The initial phase of the planning process requires strong leadership and commitment, which must come not only from school board members and school district officials; it must come from concerned and active people and organizations within the
community.

STEP 1 Initiating the Planning Process. The planning process for schools is typically initiated by the local school board or school administration, but the spark that ignites the process may come from conversations among neighbors, a small group of concerned citizens, or a single individual.

STEP 2 Funding the Planning Process. An extensive community-oriented planning process requires funding, and one of the first tasks of the initiating group will be to secure it. Since the process proposed here is both philosophically and practically a collaborative and inclusive one, a combination of public and private funds will probably provide the best funding mix. Regardless of potential funding sources, members of the initiating group need to be able to tell prospective donors why the money is needed.

STEP 3 Identifying a Facilitator. Once the school board has sanctioned a facilities planning process and secured funding to support it, the next step is to identify a facilitator to organize and oversee planning activities. Community-centered facilities planning is time-consuming and challenging; leading such a collaborative process requires great skill and commitment.

The best candidate to guide the work should possess a strong background in planning; a good working knowledge of
current educational research and best practices; effective communication skills as a listener, speaker, and writer; experience in facilitating large group meetings; and a demonstrated ability to build consensus. The candidate also must be skilled in analyzing and using data.

STEP 4 Assembling the Core Planning Team. A core planning team of about a dozen experienced and respected leaders is needed to serve as the leadership backbone for the project through to its completion. For the team to succeed, it should include credible community members who represent the full breadth of opinion within the school district.

STEP 5 Organizing the Steering Committee. One of the core planning team's initial tasks will be to organize a steering committee.While this committee will vary in size according to the makeup of the community and the school district, it should be large enough-and broad enough in its thinking-to represent the interests and resources of the entire community. Many successful steering committees have been comprised of a hundred or more educators, parents, students, and representatives from local civic and business organizations.

The steering committee ultimately will be responsible to the community for developing the facilities master plan. Among its members' most important roles will be to serve as key communicators between the community and the committee itself.

STEP 6 Involving Students. Ironically, students-the people with the largest stake in education and those most directly affected by the learning environment-are the ones most frequently excluded from decisions regarding its design. Leaving students out of the planning process is a mistake.

Clearly they have a vested interest in the outcome and deserve a place at the table. Including students is not only the right thing to do, it is the wise thing to do.

STEP 7 Involving Parents. As with students, parents historically have been a greatly underrepresented constituency in the school design process. In fact, parents have perhaps been the most underutilized resource in American education. Three decades of research has established unequivocally that parental engagement has a significant, positive influence on students' academic achievement, behavior in school, and attitudes about school and work.Yet too often parents are not included as essential partners in the education of their children. Clearly, parents have a vested interest in decisions about all aspects of schooling, not the least of which are decisions about where their sons and daughters will spend their days. They deserve a place at the table from the outset of any planning activity.

STEP 8 Involving Educators. The participation of a large contingent of educators in the facilities planning process is critical to the success of any school design. Although the need for participation may seem obvious, it has not been common. In the 1950s and 1960s, an entire generation of open-plan schools was designed and constructed with limited input from affected teachers.

While there may have been significant educational benefits in these open designs, their potential never was realized because they were developed apart from their users. Changing the configuration of the learning environment without changing the practices of teachers and learners is like
changing one half of an equation without the other: The result is imbalance.With open-plan schools, balance often was restored at considerable expense by modifying the facilities rather than changing instructional practices.

STEP 9 Involving Business. The involvement of corporations, businesses, and organizations representing businesses can enhance and legitimize the school facilities planning process.As primary "customers" for the "products" schools produce, businesses have particular needs and unique perspectives.Having businesses participate in your school's design process tells the community that supporting schools is good business.

STEP 10 Involving Senior Citizens. The design and planning of new schools should reflect two new realities: the need for life-long learning to keep citizens employed, productive, and engaged, and the coming demographic change, as the baby boom generation begins to retire. Beginning in 2011, the first wave of the 80 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 will retire. The number of citizens over age 65 will more than double from 30 million to 70 million over the next 25 years (Sullivan 2002).

STEP 11 Involving Community Organizations and Government Agencies. Cultural and civic institutions can be important partners in planning school facilities. When organizations such as museums, libraries, zoos, parks, and hospitals join forces with schools, a community can leverage these resources to enhance student learning. The partnerships foster connections that increase institutional support at many levels.

STEP 12 Involving the School Board and District Administration. The sanction of the school board is vital to the success of
any school facilities planning process. Board members can use their power and influence to bring the right players to the table, create the best possible conditions for action, and leverage the necessary resources to support the planning
process.

The school board's involvement will vary from one community to the next. In some cases, a board member may become
active on the core planning team and participate in all steering committee sessions. In others, the board may appoint
a liaison to the steering committee or choose to hear only periodic progress reports and wait to act upon recommendations from the committee.

STEP 13 Building Common Understanding, Shared Beliefs, and a Collective Vision. The steering committee's first task is to develop a common knowledge base. Participants can begin by studying community demographic studies, summaries of student achievement data, and districtwide strategic plans. They can review base documents that govern the education of their young people, including learning goals, graduation requirements and state and national standards. This is also a good opportunity to survey the attitudes and perspectives of the community.Using such data, the committee will be able to create a school and community profile that includes general characteristics, strengths, limitations, and emerging issues.

STEP 14 Determining Educational Needs. Once the collective vision has been successfully written, steering committee members will be ready-and probably eager-to draft a wish list. For such a list to advance the planning process, it must be framed in terms of facilities needs. The list should be thoughtful, strategic, and focused on the future.

STEP 15 Identifying Resources. At the same time the steering committee is analyzing facility needs, it should also be considering resources available to meet those needs. Many such resources will already be on hand at existing schools. Others may be located within the larger community. It is important that the steering committee consider both internal and external resources as potential solutions.

STEP 16 Developing Recommendations. After the steering committee has identified facilities needs and identified available resources, its next task is to prepare written facilities recommendations that match available resources to identified needs. Guiding questions for this phase of the work include: How can the school district and community work together most effectively to realize their collective vision for schools? In what ways can the school district and community combine forces to build on their strengths?

STEP 17 Communicating with the Larger Community. The steering committee should have maintained open
communications about the facilities planning process throughout its duration.

Once the recommendations report has been issued,however, the steering committee will need to embark upon a deliberate and strategic effort to publicize the report's contents and rationale. The goal of this publicity is to foster community understanding of the recommendations, solicit feedback about them, and build community consensus.

STEP 18 Creating a Master Plan
The facilities master plan is the culmination of all the steps that have come before. Before compiling the work products generated by Steps 13 through 17, however, the steering committee must carefully assess community feedback received during Step 17 and make any adjustments to the plan that it deems appropriate. That done, the committee should define action steps, determine timelines, and assign responsibilities for achieving its recommendations. It should then prioritize the recommendations, if this was not done during Step 16.

STEP 19 Implementing the Master Plan. Completing a master plan is a cause for celebration because the steering committee has accomplished its primary mission. But implementing the plan-moving from vision to action-will be its true test. Exciting plans are not enough. The hard work of the master plan will not be beneficial unless the plan is implemented.

Step 20 Be Patient. Everyone involved in the planning process must understand that implementation requires time, commitment, and oversight. Recognizing that it will take months or years before construction work is completed, many steering committees choose to stay in place throughout the process. When they do, their focus will naturally shift to the new and equally critical tasks of tracking progress and assisting the school board in its implementation tasks.

Overall, school districts tend to attract resources from larger and more-organized groups, such as corporations, local businesses, and colleges and universities, as opposed to obtaining resources from individuals and smaller groups and associations, which was typical at the school level.

According to a Rand Corporation study - Private Giving to Public Schools and Districts in Los Angeles County: A Pilot Study, Rand Corporation 2001 - the nation's public schools have been under attack over much of the past three decades. A commonly heard criticism is that school performance, as measured by students' standardized test scores, has stagnated or declined over the years. At the same time, schools have failed to close the gap in achievement between the lowest-performing and highest-performing students. This situation exists despite increased resources for public schools and attempts to allocate resources more equitably.

Dependence on state support has created a number of concerns for the nation's schools and school districts. School finance reforms have led to increased decisionmaking at the state level regarding education at a time when governance reforms call for more local control. State decisionmaking, in turn, imposes constraints on local decisionmaking. Schools have become dependent on the state economy and must compete with other demands on state resources. In addition, state education funding over time has shifted toward a greater reliance on categorical (that is, restricted) funds and a lesser reliance on general-purpose (that is, flexible) funds.

Taken together, reforms in school finance and education governance have made securing private support for public education an important activity of many public schools and districts. While public schools and districts have always attracted private support, anecdotal reports and a limited body of documented research suggest they are now pursuing private support with increased sophistication and aggressiveness.

Major gift fund raising for capital projects at K12 public schools is spreading throughout the United States and will become the norm in the 21st century. Fund raising in public schools is usually associated with projects that provide new band uniforms or bleachers. In the past Americans, as individual donors, expected their taxes to cover costs related to public school buildings. They are unaccustomed to being asked for charitable financial support, because some form of local elected or appointed government, rather than a nonprofit board of directors, holds fiduciary responsibility for the school.

Focus On Individual Giving. If your school's alumni have the same dynamics in place that a university usually has, such as a sense of allegiance, a pride in having gone there, a sense of gratification for the good education they received, then it doesn't matter if it is a junior high, high school or a university because the major gifts and planned giving process will work and your school could be sitting on millions of dollars in contributed income.

Project Appleseed recognizes that today's philanthropists are demanding a more active role in shaping the outcomes of their gifts, a result both of their entrepreneurial wealth and an emerging belief that institutions need to be scrutinized more closely. To fund the rebuilding and renovation of America's public schools, parents and schools must harness alumni - but how?

We can provide your administrators, school board members, parents, alumni and community leaders with the information, planning and leadership on key activities involving feasibility, capacity building, approval, and implementation. Our staff can help guide your schools through all fazes of your project:

E-mail Project Appleseed at info@projectappleseed.org. Tell us about your potiential project, schools, alumni and funding needs and we will provide you with information about what we can do to help your schools achieve it's major raising goals.