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The Fund for Portland Public Schools raised $1.4 million in the 2024-25 academic year, the first year when it became the primary mechanism for fundraising across the district, according to its annual report.
That marked a sea change from previous academic years, when the district’s policy permitted Local School Foundations, or LSFs, to fundraise for staffing at their individual schools.
That fundraising mechanism was controversial. Parent advocates who opposed LSFs said the schools that raised the most money were often wealthier and whiter than PPS’s average demographic. The foundations also had strong defenders: Parents came out in droves to defend their decisions to send money to their own schools. At the start of a series of budget deficits for the district, they argued the district shouldn’t turn away resources.
In May 2024, the heated discussion culminated in a 5-2 vote by the Portland School Board to alter the district’s fundraising policy. The Fund for PPS overtook the role of LSFs, with money going toward a districtwide pool instead of individual schools. (Money raised by LSFs during the 2023-24 school year could go toward staffing in 2024-25, but not beyond that.)
The initial numbers suggest that the district’s schools sacrificed a lot of money with that decision—although it’s too soon to say if the loss will be permanent.
The $1.4 million the district raised in the past year is about half of the fundraising total in each of fiscal year 2023 and 2022, when LSFs raked in about $2.5 million and $2.8 million, respectively. (The 2023-24 school year report is not available on The Fund’s website.)
When PPS used a LSF model, schools were required to donate a third of any revenue raised after $10,000 to the PPS Parent Fund, which then distributed money to at-need schools using demographic data. (The rest of the money would go toward the individual schools where parents did the fundraising.) That fund raised about $1.2 million in FY 2023 and $1.1 million in FY 2022.
In other words, the district-wide pool of funds slightly increased, at the cost of more than $1 million in money that would have funded staff at schools with previously robust fundraisers.
The question now is whether the dip in funds is a product of the transition period, or a permanent drop. That quandary will take more than one year of data to answer.
But the numbers could sound early alarms for The Fund’s implementation. Eddie Wang, the chair of the School Board and the ex-officio board member for the Fund for PPS in the 2024-25 school year, says $1.4 million was “in the middle of what we were hoping for.” He says he came to his vote at the time because he saw potential for a district-wide foundation to raise much more money than LSFs, but thinks the process could have been slower and more methodological. (“It would feel really awkward for Nike to donate millions of dollars to [one elementary school], right? Wang says. “But it wouldn’t blink to donate to PPS in general.”)
But that middling number, Wang says, is a consequence of a “pull the plug” process regarding LSFs. “I think it’s a transition year, but to be honest, the transition is a little harder because [the policy] was changed and ripped off like a Band-Aid,” he says.
“This is the thing I regret. We have a lot of local school foundation parents that are pros at fundraising,” Wang says. “They raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for their local schools. Wouldn’t it be awesome to recruit them to be part of the fund? Instead we…disenfranchised all these people.”
Former School Board member Andrew Scott, one of two “no” votes in May 2024, agrees. (At the time, Scott’s no vote came because he worried about how the district would recover money raised by LSFs, and cited a rushed process.) He says the new fundraising numbers raise some concerns for him around the potential impact they may have on PPS students.
“In 2024 the district made some important changes to ensure all students have access to a good education,” Scott says. “But they did so without a plan to replace those funds. I hope the board and superintendent are looking at the real impact of this change on our schools and doing whatever they can to mitigate it.”
The Fund’s report will go in front of the School Board on Tuesday, which is where Wang says next steps will be discussed.
He adds that another useful outcome of the switch in fundraising methods is that parents felt more urgency to advocate in Salem for state funding for PPS. (He says local schools, while barred from fundraising for staff, can still fundraise for things like equipment and supplies.)
Former School Board member Julia Brim-Edwards says the Fund for PPS helped rectify a system that was often unfair. She says that the one-third donation, the prior money-splitting policy, did not hit all schools equally: “Some schools had neither the foundation or received any of the one-third,” she says.
She adds the fund was instrumental in the passage of PPS’s $1.83 billion school construction bond, donating $30,000 to the campaign to it could hire a manager. “It was the most significant donation because it was large and when we most needed it,” she says. “That was not something the Fund had done in the last ten years.”
The report also raises additional questions about what has happened to additional staff funded by parents. The district cut 156.7 school-based positions last year amid a $40 million budget deficit. But The Fund is not currently focused on school-to-school based staffing.
Instead, The Fund focused its proceeds on select, districtwide initiatives. Its Parent Advisory Committee for the Distribution of Donations for Staffing, a group of nine parents and two students who dictate fund money, recommended $660,000 to high impact tutoring for K-3 students, $70,000 to math supports for ninth and tenth graders, and $200,000 to food pantries in 20 community schools for this academic year. Additional funds went to everything from electric buses to arts at the district. “The fund wants to focus on results, because that’s what sells when you’re fundraising,” Wang says.
