Thousands of Dollars Apart: The uneven donation amounts being given to East have prompted discussion across SMSD

The issue of disproportionate funding for extracurricular projects by the PTA in East and its feeder schools was officially discussed on Aug. 26 by the Shawnee Mission School District Board. 

While hundreds of thousands of dollars are poured into East’s bank account each year through private donors and funding, the same can’t be said for the majority of the district.

In the meeting, the Board presented various graphs put together by the Donations Task Force — a committee established in June by three board members to foster equity between schools through donation data from each SMSD high school and their feeder schools.

One graph accounted for the past three years of donations to East, showing an exorbitant $2.2 million in funds collected by East and its feeder schools. The next highest-funded high school in the district, Shawnee Mission North, received only $250,000 in donations.

Approximately $530,000 of the $2.2 million going into East was put towards the relocation and advancement of Westwood View Elementary — which had been in the works since 2021. North feeder, Rushton Elementary, was occupying Westwood View’s old building directly across the street from the new building just last year — yet their donations totaled just $2,475. 

Though this comparison may be alarming to some — especially because of the schools’ proximity — East parent and benefactor Judith Deedy critiques the accumulation of the data.

“[Westwood View’s] number was deceptive because they knew they were getting a new building, they’ve had a multi-year fundraising campaign to do improvement to the building,” Deedy said. “That number is not counting for the renovations that the schools had. It was accumulated over multiple years, not a one-year fundraising total. It was a one-year donation.” 

The same data also doesn’t account for any monetary transactions made for the learning experience, such as an administrator being moved between schools. Donations aren’t accepted for these commodities because they’re inside the classroom. 

One way for donors to benefit the district as a whole is to donate to the Shawnee Mission Education Foundation. The SMEF acts as a vessel for those who want to donate to the entire district, rather than to a specific school. 

SMEF Executive Director Kimberly Hinkle thinks the differences between the SMEF and PTA-led fundraisers are important.

“If someone wants to make sure that their donation is supporting every kid in the district, [the SMEF] would be a good place to come and make a donation,” Hinkle said.

The issue isn’t stemming from the lack of an organization to donate to, it’s stemming from the exponential amount of cash flowing into individual parent-led fundraisers. These fundraisers are inherently more successful when the income rate is higher in the area, similar to East.

To address the parents’ concerns, the SMSD Board created the task force in June, hoping to be able to appease a wider range of parents and donors all around SMSD. 

Composed of Board members Jamie Borgman, Jessica Hembree and David Westbrook — the Task Force held public meetings on June 18, July 19 and Aug. 9. They stated their intended purpose throughout all three meetings, advocating for a sense of philanthropy being fairly distributed throughout the district by analyzing and monitoring district-wide donations. 

“Our mission is to provide guidance for administrators and the Board of Education to ensure gifts, donations and bequests support SMSD’s mission of equal opportunity,” Hembree said. “Regardless of a student’s address or the economics of [their] community.”

The task force — collaborating with the schools to maintain their learning standard — can achieve learning standards that donations from parents and sponsors can’t take credit for. This isn’t shown publicly because the majority of the money being moved around is from pre-set salaries of district employees that are already available to the public eye. 

There isn’t a large investment in resources occuring, simply a smaller shift of current resources, which isn’t as noticeable in statistics.

Deedy recalls examples of this movement within schools during her time as a PTA member for Belinder Elementary in 2016. When the district relocated their reading aid to a school with a lower income rate, instead of protesting, the parents pooled their money to hire their own reading aid to still benefit the school as a whole. 

“[Lower-income schools] have higher needs than we do,” Deedy said. “Some of us have kids who are benefiting from the reading aid and some of us have kids who aren’t going to use the reading aid. [Parents] could just go hire a tutor for their own kids, or they could pool their money and we could provide a reading aid for our school, and anyone who needs it, whether they donated to it or not.”

This is another reason why East has so much more outside funding than any other school in the district — SMSD knows they are able to accumulate the money to care for itself more so than some other areas. 

The Board and task force are completely aware of the economic differences between school zones — and have been expanding their resources accordingly for years, ensuring no real impact to the quality of education at the schools. 

Yet this isn’t widely known among parents in the district to all parents in the district, so on Aug. 26, an official statement regarding the statistics on behalf of the SMSD Board was given. They discussed how they don’t have any insight into PTAs and donations specifically, but only the donations made towards capital or staffing needs.

Donations Task Force and Board member David Westbrook wanted to ensure no discouragement of community engagement.   

“[East’s funding] is not a big problem, but if we waited for it to become a big problem it would be more difficult for us to address,” Westbrook said. “So I think our job is to anticipate things that are developing that may become big problems that are more difficult to resolve when they get big.”

The district does not currently, nor will have control over where the PTA money goes, as that’s for the donors to decide. The Board can inhibit donors from altering the environment and learning experience inside the classroom, thus making the funding from parents less advantageous for each school’s academic standard.  

Nearly a third of the donations for East also go towards SHARE, a student-led volunteer organization. Though this is also specifically accounted for in the graphs provided, it still technically can benefit SMSD as a whole second-hand. 

Any parents or donors that are upset with East’s larger donations are able to donate to the entire district through the SMEF, which is another way the district is advocating for the dissipation of resources across the district. 

“The foundation believes that in order to truly practice equity, we have to support programs that benefit all kids,” Hinkle said. 

The Board reviews these policies again on Sept. 30 at the Center for Academic Achievement, where further updates will be made.