What’s the purpose of the Foundation for Springfield Public Schools? Looking to our mission statement, we are to raise, manage and distribute funds on behalf of the students of Springfield Public Schools. There are three facets of that we function under. With fundrasing, we have a couple programs. What got it started was the Technology Telethon 15 years back; since then it has been renamed Back to School. It takes about a seven-month culmination period. We do grant writing in the spring with teachers, we raise funds during the summer and award the classroom grants in September. We also kicked off Pick a Project a couple years ago, and I see it as sort of crowdfunding. If teachers don’t get their project funded through Back to School, they can submit a grant to us and we put on it our website. Anybody can go in during that point and fund that project. Manage is the second part of our mission statement, and we have about 185 funds we manage – overall about $5.7 million in assets. A lot of that is scholarships. For example, some of the original Central High grads have started a fund for students specifically at that school. We had $148,000 in scholarships on the last run.
On Sept. 4, the foundation presented more than $325,663 in Back to School grants, the largest amount to date. Where does that money come from? The unfortunate part is you juxtapose that high amount against requests. We received well over $800,000 in grant requests. We, as a committee, have to go in and score each request on things such as engagement and collaboration. What you find as the groups get together, some rise to the top and some fall to the bottom. We then fund the top tier in all categories.
A big portion of our $325,000 came from donors, and some of it came from within the district. They were able to reappropriate some of their assets. It gave them the ability to use assets already in place for something that was needed.
What drove the high need this year? This year’s demand and high-fund request was technology. With the most recent bond levy passed, it really introduced infrastructure into the district that we didn’t have before. They were limited as to how much bandwidth could be applied within the classroom. Even though we have a device in someone’s hand, it’s going to look to the Internet and they just didn’t have that before. There is a growing need. The school buildings are getting fuller, yet the funding is coming down. In past years, we have seen Back to School requests close to $300,000 and we fund $200,000. Now, we are at $800,000 versus $300,000 and a lot of that is technology. There is a bigger gap. The explosion of the iPad and tablets have opened new doors in the classroom. It’s more expensive to buy 50 iPads then 50 textbooks or fund a field trip to Wilson’s Creek. That’s a lot of the drive.
What are your goals as president this year? I’m finishing something I started when I came in as treasurer. We were going through a transition at that time with a new executive director and it was exciting. How I saw things were done, I knew there could be improvements, and I wanted to make a difference.
The Foundation wasn’t in bad financial times by any means, but what we discovered, and I find this often on not-for-profit boards, they developed amnesia. There is a 20-year history the organization can rely on, but we don’t remember what happened 20 years ago because most of us weren’t there. There was a lot of information that was here and there and someone had to make two or three phones calls to get things done. I wanted to streamline that. Back to all those funds, we went back and figured out what the original intentions of those donors were and made sure we documented it.
We brought all of our own accounting in-house. We had outsourced it to a couple different people and it was working, it wasn’t broken, but it wasn’t efficient.
This installment of Springfield Business Journal’s Architects & Engineers Project Report showcases 26 endeavors by area design and engineering professionals.
