sdhomebrewfest.com<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cYeah, yeah, yeah. Spare me the sales pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can get in for free if you volunteer,\u201d I said. \u201cYou want to volunteer?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll think about it. Hey, answer me this though: How is it fair that you guys are raising money just for your kids\u2019 public school, while public schools in other neighborhoods where maybe they don\u2019t have parents with the time or ability to raise money don\u2019t have that luxury?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re right, it\u2019s not fair,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s not fair at all. But it\u2019s the system that we\u2019ve got.\u201d And then I launched into a detailed explanation of said system, the automatic doors opening with every wave of my arms as I drew graphs and pie charts in the air, including a sidebar about the unintended consequences of the \u201cschool choice\u201d movement, through which we ended up with a vicious cycle wherein families who have the skills, time, connections and money to make a difference at their local school choose instead to go to a school that seems \u201cbetter,\u201d based on test scores, and, let\u2019s face it, demographic data (i.e. race).<\/p>\n
The long and short of my pro-foundation argument was that school budgets have been cut to the bone, and every year school administrations scramble to pay the bills for providing their students with a quality education. We want our principal to be leading the faculty and students, not scratching around for change under the sofa cushions. Yes, it\u2019s true that since the majority of Jefferson students are classified as \u201csocioeconomically disadvantaged,\u201d the school is entitled to extra federal funds under the Title I program. But that money has a lot of strings attached and can\u2019t be used for anything outside the fed\u2019s definition of \u201chelp[ing] ensure all children meet challenging state academic standards.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut still,\u201d my friend continued, \u201cif the basic educational needs are met, shouldn\u2019t that be enough to expect from a public school?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess you could say that,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd don\u2019t get me wrong, Jefferson is a great school that offers way more enrichment-type-stuff than you would think, based on how people talk about the shameful state of public education. My kids have Spanish, dance and art classes in addition to the basics. But some of that is funded by a federal grant the school got that is going to dry up soon, some of it was offered for free by very generous outside educational organizations, and all of it requires a lot of juggling and begging on the part of the principal.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd frankly, if we lost all those enrichment opportunities, my kids would be fine. Their teachers have been excellent, and the whole school community is just a pleasure to be involved with. If my kids lack enrichment, they can go to art camp, music lessons, language programs, whatever, because our family has the resources to do that. But most of their classmates don\u2019t. We want the foundation to make enough money to fill at least some of those gaps so that all the kids can have those fun, inspiring experiences. We haven\u2019t made anywhere near that kind of money yet, but that\u2019s our long-term goal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFurthermore,\u201d I went on despite his raising a finger to indicate his desire to interject, \u201cas you know, another goal of Friends of Jefferson is to make the school more attractive to local families. When parents can pick and choose between public schools in other neighborhoods or charter schools or private schools, the neighborhood school has to offer some \u2018extras\u2019 in order to compete.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it\u2019s like an arms race between parents at different schools, trying to out-fundraise one another and steal students from each other?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot exactly,\u201d I answered. \u201cTake McKinley Elementary, for example, right down the road from Jefferson. They have an incredibly effective foundation, famous for throwing the SoNo Fest and Chili Cook-off, one of the biggest fundraising block-parties in the area. Their foundation makes enough money to fund Spanish, art, ceramics, dance, music and gardening programs. They don\u2019t want to \u2018steal\u2019 any of our potential students, because, thanks to their foundation, most of the families in their zone are more than comfortable sending their kids there. But a number of kids from the Jefferson zone \u2018choice\u2019 into McKinley because it has more goodies than we can afford. The McKinley folks have been a great help with our efforts to get families from the Jefferson zone to go to Jefferson, but the success of their foundation has made their school really attractive to the families all over the area.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo why is McKinley\u2019s foundation so much better than yours?\u201d my friend asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d I continued, calling him a name not fit for a family publication, \u201cthey\u2019ve just been at it longer. They were in a similar situation to Jefferson when they started their foundation many years ago. Jefferson has only had a foundation for a couple years. As McKinley\u2019s foundation grew, the affluent, educated families in their zone started sending their kids there, parent involvement increased, donations increased, more opportunities became available to the students; then more local families enrolled, and so on. A virtuous cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you\u2019re trying to start your own SoNo Fest, raise a bunch of money, and lure the rich kids to your school,\u201d he observed.<\/p>\n
\u201cKind of,\u201d I responded.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo then,\u201d he went on, with the gleam of an impending gotcha in his eye, \u201cwhat happens when all the affluent, hipster, white parents send their kids to Jefferson and displace the low-income families that go there now? What then, Mr. Bleeding Heart?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, first off, Mr. Black-hearted Cynic,\u201d I said, \u201cwe are quite a ways off from that scenario. If we follow McKinley\u2019s trajectory, by the time my kids graduate from Jefferson, we will have achieved something approaching ethnic and socioeconomic diversity (as opposed to the vast majority of students being in the same ethnic and socioeconomic brackets, as has been the case in Jefferson\u2019s recent history). And diversity is the ideal circumstance for learning, according to research and also my bleeding heart values. Now, if North Park keeps getting whiter and more prosperous, and the diversity equation becomes totally reversed, I can only hope what I have always hoped: that as a country, we will build the political will to support the world-class education system our kids deserve. One where teachers are highly trained, highly paid, and highly respected, all kids are held to the same high expectations, and funding is truly sufficient and equitable throughout the country, so we don\u2019t have to sell beer to pay for our kids\u2019 art classes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, that\u2019s gonna happen,\u201d he responded, rolling his eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cJerk,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou playing cards tonight?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah. You gonna volunteer at the Homebrew Fest?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSure.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014Contact <\/em>Andy Hinds at <\/em>facebook.com\/friendsofjeffersonelementary\u00a0or\u00a0<\/em>friendsofjeffersonnp@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Andy Hinds | Parenting I bumped into a friend at a soon-to-be defunct grocery store in North Park, a guy who sometimes likes to bait me for my goody-goody populist idealism. He was coming in as I was going out. \u201cHey, I saw that flier for your fundraiser for the PTA,\u201d he said, as […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1274,"featured_media":248896,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"In North Park, Homebrew Fest is the new bake sale","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11547,11551,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-news","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Andy](\"https:\/\/sduptownnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Andy_Hinds-291x300web.jpg\")
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