Back to School and Back to Fundraising

My wife and I have spent nine wonderful years at Farragut Elementary School, we've met lifelong friends and had a great time organizing fundraisers, helping out in class (entirely my wife's effort) and taking a very active and interested role in all aspects of the school.

As the kids head off to new beginning's—one daughter started high school this week and the other started middle school—Kim and I are already receiving fliers and emails about volunteering and donating money to several cash-strapped departments.

Maybe it is because I am from England, but I find I'm a little ferklempt. How did we get to a place where, in order to give our child a good public education, we have to supplement the school budgets to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars (at Farragut we raised on average 120,000.00 per year)? This is hard-earned parent cash. Everyone knows we are in a very challenging economy, and it seems it will be more and more difficult to maintain this level of fundraising.

Some of the best times I have had at Farragut have been while working the Fall Festival, Artworks or the Bingo Night.  But I have become increasingly uneasy with the direction this has all gone in the last three or four years. It seems to me that the "burden" has fallen squarely on the parents.

The state is in a fiscal nightmare, so the state legislature decides they are going to take funds from the school budgets in order to make the cavernous short fall in the state budget look just a little less disastrous.

So here it is, the source of my ferklemption (not sure if this is even a word). On the one hand, the "let's attack the problem" side of me is gung ho to volunteer, organize, attend fundraisers, make solicitation calls to local businesses, and just jump in and "make it happen." Then the "Let's analyze what's actually going on here" side of me kicks in, and I feel a certain level of resistance.

Frankly, sometimes I think we are simply being screwed.

Did you know that in the last 23 years, California has built just one new university, UC Merced, while at the same time California has built 23 prisons at a cost of $100 million a pop? This is just to build one—think of the ongoing management and maintenance costs. In this same time period, California schools have consistently slipped down the rankings, now languishing at No. 48 out of the 50 Sates. In the 1950s, California was No. 1.

Are we as parents playing into the hands of the legislature by acting in the "let's fix the problem" mode? Just last year, the Culver City School Board successfully slid past the electorate a parcel tax. It was just one more dip into the pocket of the folks who are already paying taxes, volunteering and donating their time money and resources because the state has completely mismanaged...well, the state.

Maybe it's time we stopped donating so much and started electing people that can actually fix this problem from the top. 

Mike King is an Associate Partner at Partners Trust Real Estate and Acquisitions. He is passionate about three things: Family, Real Estate, and McVities Chocolate Biscuits (or cookies to the uninitiated). You can connect with Mike on Twitter @mikeking4reand on Facebook.