This article is one of a series of articles produced by Word in Black through support provided by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Word In Black is a collaborative of 10 Black-owned media outlets across the country.
By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
The Parent Teacher Association (PTA) has a rich and long history advocating for children and their education. Local and state PTAs and the National Parent Teacher Association (National PTA) have labored for over 100 years to better the lives of children in health, education, and safety. Today’s PTAs are a network of millions of parents, teachers, administrators, students, families, business, and community leaders.
While there are many disparities that exist in education, the number and tremendous gap in these disparities were very visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. These disparities in resources can affect the schools and their students’ success, and PTAs can be that stopgap as they work to provide resources to their individual schools.
The long-standing issue is that some schools are located in regions that possess more resources than others. Typically, wealthier areas have higher property taxes to rely on, while lower-income communities or communities without PTAs lack those same kinds of resources. However, some PTAs around the region are looking for answers to tackle this fundamental financial stalemate.
“Individual schools normally have a PTA,” says Megan Callow, co-founder of the Central and North Seattle Schools PTA Alliance (CANSSPA), an organization dedicated to looking at some of the inequities that exist across public schools, including disparities in fundraising by PTAs. “But different PTAs across the city can raise exorbitantly different amounts of money every year.”
“Ostensibly, the state is offering equitable funding for schools based on how many students are enrolled, even based on some kind of equity-driven metric, like household income, free and reduced lunch, students with special needs, etc. Those differences quickly become erased by the PTA’s ability to raise different sums of money,” added Callow.
One initiative to help level the playing field, #TakeBackPTA, was initiated by Seattle Public School PTA, a citywide organization, in 2018. The initiative, according to organizers, was a call to action to our local leaders, community members, and communities to take the PTAs back for ourselves.
“The Seattle Council PTSA, which is like the umbrella that sort of encompasses all the Seattle Public School PTAs, theoretically passed a resolution called TakeBackPTA,” says Kevin Litwack, Advocacy Chair for the Leschi Elementary School PTA. “The gist of it was that the PTA was originally conceived to be about advocacy. Parents and communities getting together and organizing for ALL schools and ALL children.”
Today there is a concerted and collaborative effort on the part of PTAs across Seattle to unify the collective in order to sustain and finance schools equally.
“Before the TakeBackPTA resolution, PTAs got much more focused on fundraising for their specific schools,” says Litwack. “So, we ended up with a lot of PTAs, especially in the wealthiest and frankly whitest neighborhoods, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, which they donated directly to their neighborhood schools to pay for anything from supplies to actually paying for full-time staff.”
“While conversely, you had other schools where the PTAs were only able to raise a few thousand dollars or didn’t even have a PTA at all, and a lot of those schools I imagine were in less wealthy and demographically less white parts of the city,” continued Litwack. “So the TakeBackPTA resolution was basically saying, ‘Hey, this is a problem, and we should try to move back towards de-emphasizing fundraising, fundraising at the individual school level, and putting more emphasis on collective advocacy.'”
There are several PTA organizations such as the Southeast Seattle Schools Fundraising Alliance (SSSFA) and CANSSPA who are working to bring a more unified front, particularly when it comes to funding equity in addressing the needs of students, teachers, and their schools. Regardless, most schools don’t have enough money to cover all the costs of a well-rounded education. Both Litwack and Callow agree that it has been a struggle to collectively bring the PTAs together to benefit all kids in the district has become a hard or difficult sell over the years.
“There are very different and strong opinions about how learning advocacy and funding can be achieved on the PTSA level, the grassroots level,” says Callow. “And that’s why it can be such an uphill battle for the three organizations dedicated to fund shifting.”
“Many, many families are like, why? My donations are meant for my kid’s school and my kid’s school alone. Why should I share my hard-earned dollars with other school communities that I am not affiliated with? Trying to make the argument that a donation to all schools, all kids, is good for your kid, but that has been a hard sell,” Callow adds.
Litwack agrees that most families are only interested in the best interest of their individual schools.
“The funding equity is a big component of what is going on,” says Litwack. “There is also an intention to try and connect PTAs to each other because I think one of the observations that people are making is that there is really isn’t a lot of conversation across schools. Most PTAs are just really focused on their own individual schools, and there is not a lot of conversation happening around, ‘Hey, what all are you funding? What is your budget like? Here’s our budget. What are you doing that is working to engage parts of the community that are hard to engage?'”
“So, one of the goals is to try and build some of that ‘community’ across all PTAs as well,” concluded Litwack.
