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STATE FUNDING EQUITY

Winter 1999 (v3#2)
Community Mobilization:
Moving Parents to the Front Lines on School Funding Reform

For years the Educational Priorities Panel and others have been saying that New York City schools are underfunded and do not receive a fair share of state education funding. The problem has been, how do we get the word about funding inequities out to the wider public and, in particular, parents of the city’s public school children? More importantly, how do we get parents to take the lead in fighting for school funding reform?

To address these issues, EPP and the New York Urban League jointly launched a grass-roots Community Mobilization campaign earlier this year to reach out to parents and community residents throughout New York City to help build a constituency for reform. The objectives of this Community Mobilization effort are: 1) to inform parents and community residents about current funding inequities and the need for reform; 2) to disseminate information about reform efforts, including the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit; and 3) to work with parent and community groups to help them develop action plans to make an impact on decision-makers. This two-year campaign is part of an initiative funded by the Donors‚ Education Collaborative, the Equity Reform Project, involving EPP, CFE, the New York Urban League, the New York State League of Women Voters and the State Communities Aid Association.

Engaging Parents
How do you engage and organize parents and community members, never an easy task, around an issue as abstract as funding equity? First, we try to define the problem in human terms by showing Listen to the Children, EPP’s video documenting the impact of funding gaps on children. We also focus on one very concrete and glaring example of inequity for city schools, class size, which is already a critical issue for parents. Under the state’s Class Size Reduction initiative (see article on p. 4), New York City, with the largest class sizes in the state, 28 students in the elementary grades compared to 22 elsewhere, can finally gain some parity with other areas of the state. We have also developed an interactive activity, the "State Funding Game," which makes the sometimes dauntingly complex issue of funding very clear.

Actually, it’s the "game" that proves to be the grabber. Using play money and a few other props, parents get totally involved in playing the roles of different school districts around the state. One parent, playing the role of Buffalo, exclaimed while taking the money out of her envelope, "Is that all there is? How am I supposed to pay for everything I need with this!" Another parent from the Bronx declared, "This has been a real eye-opener. I had no idea New York City kids were getting $1,000 less than the state average."

To date, we have conducted more than twenty sessions involving parent leaders from more than 250 schools. These parent leaders, in turn, have generated hundreds of letters to the Governor calling for reform of the state’s education funding system. They’ve also begun collecting petition signatures calling on elected officials to increase investment in class size reduction and school facilities. Getting parents out to testify at Community School Board hearings on the Board of Education 5 Year Capital plan was another result of our mobilization efforts.

Several parent organizations have joined with us in planning other actions, including a demonstration against the Governor’s proposed budget and program cuts. In addition to outreach to citywide parent groups, such as the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, United Parents Associations and Parent Organizing Consortium, we’ve begun to do presentations to Presidents Councils in individual community school districts. The goal is to reach parent leaders in all 32 community school districts and 6 high school superintendencies and to make the underfunding of city schools a top priority for them.

Big 5 Community Mobilization
Changing the way that the state funds schools, however, requires that we go beyond the confines of the city and seek allies across the state whose interests closely parallel our own. Our natural allies are the other large, urban, dependent districts, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester and Yonkers, which, together with New York City, are commonly referred to as the Big 5. For this reason, EPP and the New York Urban League, in conjunction with Urban League

affiliates in the Big 5 and interested other urban districts, will conduct Community Mobilization campaigns among parent and community groups in those cities. By our combined mobilization efforts in New York City and the other Big 5 districts we hope to muster sufficient legislative support to substantially reform school funding to benefit poor urban children.

According to Adrian Lewis, the Urban League’s Community Mobilization coordinator, "The New York Urban League believes that community mobilization is an essential strategy for education reform. It is important that community residents, particularly parents, understand that schools lacking experienced and talented teachers, state-of-the art educational tools and safe and spacious facilities, cannot and will not get children to achieve the new high academic standards."

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