School's math lesson: Count on grants.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 5/12/04): The Eugene School District received $16.3 million in grant money in 2002-03, a district spokeswoman says. A chart accompanying a front page story Tuesday on school grants reported Oregon Department of Education figures showing the district received $40.7 million in grants. The larger figure includes a number of other funding sources in addition to grant money, the district says.

You might call Elaine Bryson a rainmaker.

At the McKenzie School District, where she works as grant coordinator, 47 percent of next year's $3.8 million operating budget will come from outside grants. That means almost half of the school budget is paid for not by local and state taxes but by sources ranging from the federal government's massive education subsidies to tiny philanthropic organizations.

As a result, the 300-student rural district will have a high school counselor again next year - thanks to an Oregon Student Assistance Commission grant of about $30,000.

McKenzie has an after-school homework program at its Family Resource Center, paid for by a $36,530 grant from the Oregon Commission on Children and Families.

As other districts are cutting staff and reducing school calendars, next year McKenzie will start a preschool program, paid for in part by a $3,150 planning grant from the Oregon Community Foundation.

"If you took all that grant money away and we had to offer an education with what the state gives us, we'd be in trouble," Superintendent Susan Taylor-Greene says.

The district has suffered financially from falling enrollment, state-mandated property-tax caps and the decline of the timber economy over the past two decades.

Its success in attracting grants is unusual, but paying for public education with money from nontraditional sources is on the rise everywhere.

Pleasant Hill School District, for example, is relying on a number of grants and donations to keep its classes going. The forestry program, which was nearly cut several years ago, is covered by a $27,000 pool of money collected mostly from the Friends of Paul Bunyan Foundation, Weyerhaeuser Corp. and the Oregon Forestry Council.

The rural district also has hired two teachers whose salaries are paid by parent donations - a half-time kindergarten teacher and a half-time sixth-grade teacher.

"The parents felt it was really important that they do what they could to reduce class size for their grade," district business manager Janet Luke says. "We have had a lot of cuts since Measure 5."

Once, Oregon residents paid for schools almost entirely from local property taxes, subject to local votes. But as Measure 5 and related initiatives capped property taxes, the state stepped in to equalize school funding from district to district. As a result, schools have found it difficult to raise more money than the state formula provides.

In the short term, no one's complaining about the use of grants. When your house is on fire, as nearly everyone involved in education finance says, you don't ask where the water's coming from to put it out.

But in the long haul, the increased reliance on grant programs - especially from private sources - raises a number of questions.

Money comes ... and goes

"You could end up with school policy very distorted by the objectives or interests of a small number of people," says Paul Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

Hill says he hasn't run into a school district as successful as McKenzie in attracting grant money. "That's very interesting," he says. "Very smart. It raises a lot of philosophical issues. But the practical issues trump them."

The most obvious long-term problem with grants is that grant money almost always goes away, leaving the district right back where it started.

"Grants are usually on a two- or three-year cycle," McKenzie's Taylor-Greene says. "If there's an opportunity to get them renewed, that's great. But if you start up something and the money is gone, you lose the program."

Ron Hitchcock, superintendent of the Lane Education Service District, which processes a lot of grants for small rural districts in the county, says the extra dollars are welcome.

But, he adds: "The downside is, those dollars may not be there the following year or year after. It is hard to hire staff and put programs in place knowing they are tenuous."

The most contentious issue may be the practice of allowing parents to raise money for a specific program, classroom or teacher.

Since 1995, the Portland School District has had a policy that allows parents to do private fund raising for classrooms - but only so long as a third of it is shared with the private Portland Schools Foundation. The foundation redistributes the wealth to poorer schools in Portland.

Cynthia Guyer, the foundation's executive director, says she fields two calls a day from national news media asking about the unusual program, which is designed both to benefit schools that need the money and to keep wealthy parents from fleeing the district.

"Parents say, 'If you tell me I can't raise money for keeping class size down but I can raise money for PTA murals on walls and field trips to the coast, then I am going to go to a private school,' ' Guyer says.

Portland parents raise about $1.5 million a year, she says; the foundation distributes its third of the money in school grants that range from $25,000 to $50,000 each.

Restrictions attached

A deeper issue around private money in public education is the question of who controls the purse strings of the district.

When a wealthy private organization such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives North Eugene High School $900,000 to break the high school up into small schools, it's easy to wonder whether creating small schools is an idea that happened to find a grant - or a big attractive grant that sparked an educational reform.

Eugene School District grant writer Jo Ann Mazzarella says the small school idea was brewing well before the Gates money showed up. "We were already interested," she says. "So it was a really nice fit for us."

And while Weyerhaeuser may have a corporate ax to grind in funding Pleasant Hill's forestry program, the same program used to be supported by public money - so it's hard to argue that the timber giant has influenced the school curriculum.

But even educators worry that cash-strapped school districts might bend their goals to match them with those of grant-making organizations.

"Every grant that I know of comes with a set of expectations," says Hitchcock, the Lane ESD superintendent. "You rarely find a grant that is perfectly aligned with an existing set of board or school priorities. It's a little like fitting a round peg into a square hole."

Mazzarella says schools are well aware of the issue of conflicting goals when they apply for grants.

"There are some grants that supply a lot of money to do things that we don't particularly want to do," she says. "But I think we're really careful."

Grant givers voice the same concerns, from the opposite point of view: They fully expect to buy influence with their money. Bill Porter is executive director of Grantmakers for Education, a Portland-based national organization of 200 foundations that donate to education.

"If you think about foundations and donors as investors, what they hope to get from their grants to schools is altruistically what we all hope to get from our involvement in schools: You're hoping to improve the circumstances of children in that school," Porter says.

People and foundations that give money to education expect a return on their investment, Porter says, usually in the form of some kind of measurable change. "With our little money, what is the maximum social payback we can get?"

That social impact can be diluted, he says, if school districts begin to rely on grant income for day-to-day operations.

Still, he doesn't fault aggressive districts such as McKenzie.

"I say more power to them," he says. "When the house is burning down, don't you deal with that immediate need?"

FUNDS POUR IN

Grant funding in Lane County school districts as a percentage of operating budget 2002-2003

District Grants Budget Percent

Bethel $10,752,402 $41,132,578 26

Creswell 2,325,182 8,614,079 27

Crow-Applegt.-Lorane 652,419 NA NA

Eugene 4J 40,792,888 139,781,017 29

Fern Ridge 2,101,455 12,436,165 17

Junction City 2,214,068 12,715,886 17

Lowell NA 2,640,427 NA

Mapleton 498,059 2,571,376 19

Marcola 501,477 2,430,623 21

McKenzie 1,182,594 3,050,355 39

Pleasant Hill 1,958,902 7,835,197 25

Siuslaw 97J 2,115,877 11,201,826 19

South Lane 4,457,012 21,033,603 21

Springfield 25,542,234 77,086,370 33

- Oregon Department of Education

CAPTION(S):

Ethan Rux, 11, studies in a McKenzie School District homework club funded by a grant.