At the beginning of each school year, the Park City Education Foundation asks families to donate a dollar per school day or $180 per student to support their programs that would otherwise be unfunded by the Park City School District. This year, however, the rules have changed just a bit and Melissa Allison tells us how:
The campaign has grown significantly since its inception about 12 years ago. When the Park City Education Foundation started asking for families to pay a dollar a day or a $180 contribution, they had about 12 percent of district families participate. That number according to Park City Education Foundation Associate Director Jennifer Billow has now grown to about 70 percent of families in the district.
Billow said the funding campaign sets up the rest of the year for them.
“That is kind of the base of everything and so, the success of that kind of gears our whole year," Billow said. "And parents being willing to donate that and make it the base of the rest of our fundraising, it gives us a really solid footing to know we’re going to have a successful year and then be able to fund the programs next year.”
In the past, parents have been able to make that donation when they paid their students class fees. But now that the Park City School District has done away with those fees, that’s no longer an option.
Parents can now make those donations at pcef4kids.org. If you forget to contribute, the foundation will call you as part of their Beat the Call program. Program Director Kara Cody said every bit helps.
“And we really do ask the families to give what they can," Cody said. "For some families, that’s, you know, not a problem. For others it might be a little bit tough, but we just ask, you know, give what you can to help support our programs. You can also break that down to $15 dollars a month as well, if that’s a little bit more manageable. But, because of the generosity of the community is how the Ed Foundation is able to support great programs like mindfulness, elementary visual arts, just a whole cadre of great programs for our students.”
The foundation started their fundraising efforts in July and Billow said they have already committed to funding about a million dollars in programs.
"So, we have several programs that we commit to for three years because they're so critical to the district," Billow said. "And we've found that having coming back to have to ask for those in a grant every year was actually, we just knew we were going to approve it for instance the EVA art program or the One Book One Community program. So, we thought let’s have it be every three years - we can collect a lot more data and then tweak it going forward after that."
For more information you can visit pcef4kids.org.
I’m Melissa Allison, KPCW News.