Bake sales and car washes may come to mind at the mention of school fundraisers, but many institutions, including those on the South Coast, are increasingly turning to a higher-caliber method for augmenting their funding streams: school foundations.
“They definitely provide a significant amount of resources that supplement what we get from the state to educate the kids,” said Margie Yahyavi, executive director of the Santa Barbara Education Foundation.
| Good for Santa Barbara | Complete Series Index |
School and district education foundations are nonprofits that work closely with their school or district’s administration to fund raise for any number of projects or needs.
They’re separate entities from their institutions, with their own governing boards and bylaws.
“Education foundations have been a growing interest on the road map for many years,” said Bill Banning, superintendent of Goleta Union School District and a member of the Goleta Education Foundation advisory board.
As foundations continue to trend, a handful of primary and secondary schools in the greater Santa Barbara area already have their own.
Santa Barbara’s Harding University Partnership School and Peabody Charter School, both elementary schools, have foundations. Dos Pueblos High School’s renowned engineering academy in Goleta is bolstered by its own foundation, as is the Multimedia Arts & Design (MAD) Academy on the campus of Santa Barbara High School.
The scope and focus of those nonprofits, however, depend on the needs of their corresponding institutions as well as how prolific other fundraising organizations, like parent-teacher associations, are.
“I think that if you asked superintendents in a hundred districts with a hundred foundations, you’d have a hundred different answers about how important they are,” Banning told Noozhawk.
“Foundations will never take over a huge portion or percentage of the dollars,” he said. “They can help the district with certain initiatives that are beyond their core budget of expenses; they can help try and support schools that have more challenges fundraising.”
District-wide foundations can expand their scope and focus as they grow and examine their schools’ needs.
The Goleta Education Foundation began with an emphasis on funding arts and physical education, Banning said, but has since worked to bring LED flat-screen TVs and iPads to classrooms.
According to Yahyavi, schools receive from the State of California about $8,000 per student for their programs, even though the need in some local and regional districts is two to three times that.
“We have a lot of need, and we have a very generous community that will step in and invest in our kids,” she said.
“Schools will issue bonds to help pay for capital improvements from time to time,” said Greg Tebbe, a board member of the Foundation for Santa Barbara High School and campaign chairman for the school’s Peabody Stadium Renovation.
“But there are a lot of things that are ongoing that they need, and they can’t always issue bonds.”
Because some academic and sports groups already have fundraising organizations, the Foundation for SBHS’s primary aim is to positively affect as many students as possible, Tebbe and board president Lizzie Peus said.
“The key to success is the line of communication between the administration and us,” Peus told Noozhawk.
Loyal alumni, parents, businesses and other foundations in the community all contribute to the foundation, which also has a capital campaign arm for the school’s brick-and-mortar needs.
The nearly $20 million Peabody Stadium Renovation is its biggest campaign yet and one of the largest projects in Santa Barbara Unified School District history.
Such an undertaking requires a bottom-up funding approach.
“We’ve never had a big gala, party fundraiser,” Peus said. “We have been much more grassroots and direct mail.”
Tebbe said that, besides the board, roughly 50 people were involved in the football stadium fundraising campaign, which first required thorough research and planning that would demonstrate to donors how critical and realistic the project is.
The nearly century-old Peabody Stadium’s grandstand does not meet modern building and accessibility codes, and few sports — not even P.E. and track — can use the facility.
The renovation project was first conceived in 2010, and fundraising only recently has been completed after kicking off in 2015.
The foundation added $5 million to contributions from the district and state, Peus said. Tebbe put the total project cost at $18 million to $20 million.
The district, he said, is now in charge of construction, which is expected to begin in early 2017 and take around 15 months to complete.
With the passage of Measure I in the Nov. 8 election, SBUSD secondary schools would receive $135 million for repairs and renovations, which would speed up the stadium project timeline.
| Good for Santa Barbara | Complete Series Index |
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
