Faith Raises $1 Million; Can Madison Do $34 Million?
If you think Madison High School is in bad shape, take a look at the situation out west in Faith. That district's main building was condemned and torn down in 2003, and the 200 or so K-12 students have been running back and forth among seven mobile trailers used to provide fourteen classrooms.
But unlike Madison, which tried to give us another high-pressure sales job this winter on the first draft of a $16.98-million new gym plan with high school renovations on the side, Faith has been patiently planning and fundraising. They've now raised a million dollars, over $400,000 of that from an old local codger who never finished high school. Add three million for a loan covered by taxpayers, and Faith will be able to let bids in March and get its new building by fall 2012.
What can we Madison Central school boosters learn from Faith's example?
1. Don't use fundraising as a campaign ploy. Madison Central did some fundraising for its new gym and high school renovations. However, the school district used the announcement of $422,000 in donations toward the facility as a sort of October surprise in its push to win voter approval. Superintendent Vince Schaefer told voters one week before the election that the donors would chip in this money only if voters said Yes on February 1. Some voters took that fundraising claim as just one more high-pressure sales tactic from the school.
2. Lock in those private dollars up front. Using donations as a tease to get voter approval didn't work because voters had no guarantee that the private money would materialize or that the school would lower the bond amount accordingly. Faith has those donations in the bank, in a specific building fund. Getting those donations up front is all the more important if you consider the experience of Harrisburg High School, where the Tiger Nation booster club pledged to raise $250,000 a year to help pay for the gym and arts facilities for their new high school. Voters finally approved a bond issue with that promise in mind. Tiger Nation then discovered it didn't have the fundraising clout it thought it did and left the school district holding the bag. Money talks, other stuff walks. Get donations, not pledges.
3. Set a target. Faith set a fundraising target of one million dollars, a quarter of its expected building costs. I've never heard Madison Central set a similar goal. Faith has an enrollment of 200. As a measure of money available for a fundraising campaign, in FY 2010, the city of Faith reported $16.7 million in taxable sales. Madison has an enrollment of 1150. In FY 2010, we reported taxable sales of $567 million. Pick your proportion: by enrollment, we should be able to set a fundraising target five times Faith's: $5 million. By proportional economic activity, we should have 34 times the fundraising capacity of Faith. Our economy could support a $34 million private fundraising target. (We could build gyms to name for Sharon, Vince, and Bud!) Set a target, get your donors excited, and push everyone to reach that goal.
4. Adjust the bond issue downward based on donations received. With donations in hand, Faith School District can say, "We have one million dollars. Thank you. We now need three million in tax support for the building, and that's what we'll spend, no more." If $17 million is the rock-bottom price for fixing all that's wrong with Madison's high school, the district should raise money first, announce the amount raised, subtract that amount from the $17 million price tag, and put exactly that difference on the next bond issue ballot.
5. Fundraise publicly. Name names. Every level of Madison government has far too great a proclivity for doing things behind closed doors. We have yet to hear who the $422,000 donors were. We have no idea whether the donors were two local fat cats or a groundswell of hundreds of citizens kicking in a piggy bank or two each. Faith can put names and faces to its donors. They get good press out of it. DSU does the same thing. If you want to campaign for a new high school building, publicizing your donors is an obvious way to do it. Plus, put those donor names in the paper, and they're much less likely to renege.
6. Don't rush. Madison hasn't been rushing to do its repairs. I've said that everything that's really wrong with the building has been wrong with it since the 1980s. I've heard a gal who graduated in the 1990s say the same thing... and she said her mom who graduated in the 1970s has said the same thing. But laggardly maintenance doesn't mean we have to rush to buy the architect's first draft. Faith has gotten by with trailers (yes, a suboptimal learning environment) for more than seven years. They have taken their time, raised money, and worked out a plan they can afford. Instead of taking the architect's first draft and swallowing it whole, Madison can take its time, collect and count its pennies, review more alternatives, incorporate more community input, and get the building repairs it needs.
I don't think private dollars should take on the burden of all school funding. Education is a public responsibility, and we should fulfill that responsibility with public dollars, taxes shared by all who benefit from good schools. But if there are folks who wish to shoulder more of that burden, we should follow Faith's example, get thoe folks on the record and their money in the bank, and make a solid Madison High School renovation plan more viable.
Let me enlighten everyone: people with lots of money will not give you their hard-earned cash to support what the public will not.
Again with this 'enlighten' attitude, enough of 'this is too smart for you', enough of 'this is the way things are done', enough of 'this we know what's good for you'. Enough.
And for the people with lots of money, good for them, they made their riches of the backs, hearts, and minds of all of us beneath them. They keep all of us 'where we belong'. They keep us 'struggling to feed our families'. They keep us 'barely human'.
I always thought that the public was over-estimated too, besides 'they hate children', and last I heard, they eat their soup from cans as they gamble away their minimum wage.
Damn public, give them nothing but an opportunity, and all they can do is screw up and say, 'sorry boss, how did you ever get to be so enlightened anyhow'
Honestly.
Disagree, Mike. The community center is a prime example where giving/solid donations led the way for two public entities(DSU and city of madison) to partner together to build a project which neither could do on their own. You are also wrong to assume that the public will not support upgrading the MHS or that the recent bond issue vote was a sign of the voters not wanting to support education. The public wants a better plan focused on needs placing emphasis on safety and classroom education.
Highmore held a similar albeit much smaller fund drive about 15 years ago. The Hyde County Memorial Auditorium, the venue for all the school basketball and volleyball games, had always had a tile floor. The local Booster Club lobbied for a wood floor but the school board, city council and county commission all refused to pay for it, citing limited budgets for extras. After receiving the no decisions the Booster Club launched a fundraiser and expected to raise the total (I'm thinking $100,000 but don't remember for sure) in two years. In less than a month, with a well publicized fund raiser, the cash was in hand and that summer a new floor was installed. Local people and school alumni stepped up. A prominent feature of the project is a plaque on the wall with nameplates featuring the names of givers. There are different levels of giving listed,100, 250, 500, 1000. I really don't think there were many, if any, donations over 1000, just a lot of buy in from the community and lots of names on the wall.
Madison is a big enough community with a number of successful businessmen. If an 8th grade dropout can make that kind of donation to little Faith SD surely some of the Madison locals can step up for the good of the town.
If you want to argue that private individuals should carry more of the educational burden, that is one thing, but I wouldn't point to Faith as a situation that we should be looking to emulate. 8 years of students going to school in trailers sounds like a educational disaster, not a victory for common sense, collective decision-making.
Let's hope that Madison is able to address the inadequecies of the high school before the situation goes from sub-optimal to outright crisis, as Faith was apparently unable to do.
From what I've read on this blog, voters are unwilling to support a luxury gym as part of any remodel. They want a new plan with needs not wants.
There are people willing and able to give money for projects that go above and beyond what is absolutely necessary. They cannot donate to something (a gym) that will not be included as part of remodel plan that Cory will support.
Faith's situation is different than here. They took seven long years to accumulate enough money to build a new school. What they did have was a clear vision of what they wanted to accomplish. If we want improvements to happen at the school, we must create that vision that will inspire people to not only give money privately but generate the votes needed to approve a remodel.
I'm impressed with Faith. Though their situation seems much more in-need than Madison so that could be why they succeeded.
To me it looks like some people in Madison are a little greedy and letting the school decay rather than maintain it. In return people will see how old it is getting and vote for a new school.
(I've heard of other schools using the same tactic to influence the vote)
The primary purpose of the capital outlay fund is building and repair of buildings. Madison decided that a new elementary school was necessary several years ago, and it obligated the capital outlay fund for years (12 left) to pay for it without a separate bond issue. So why not fix what absolutely needs fixing in the high school for safety issues, maybe try to pay off the elementary school sooner, and then remodel or build new with the then available capital outlay funds? The capital outlay levy has been at the maximum for quite a few years and takes in over a million dollars a year. That should be enough to finance the project without further obligating the same taxpayers for an additional amount.
This is no different than a person who purchases a home or new car etc with loans, knowing that he will have that monetary obligation for a set number of years, and that he won't have that money available for other wants for that length of time. A responsible person realizes this and plans accordingly. When his loans are paid off, he is then free to borrow for other wants.
Maybe the school powers should delay the renovation/new construction until the capital outlay fund is available. During this time they could be conducting fund raising efforts and put these funds in an escrow account where they would collect interest (not much I know, but every little bit helps!). When the capital outlay fund is not obligated, there would be that money besides the donated funds available without further burden on the same taxpayers.
If you look at the pictures, those trailers are more substantial than it sounds and actually a creative short term solution. We all want a conducive learning environment, but a big money project doesn't simply create that. We're a Chevy town and there's no shame in that. A more moderate proposal representative of this community will pass.
Linda, I still believe there needs to be a vote for whatever project happens. No one got to vote on the new elementary school. How much resentment still lingers over the building of the Madison Middle School after all these years?
We have a gym that does not have enough space to allow adequate seating. People trying to get to their seats end up walking on the edge of the floor on one side and in front of the players chairs and scoring table on the other side. It's a HUGE safety issue. People track in snow from outside, go to the bathroom or the concession stand. Bud Postma runs around the entire game trying to keep the floor dry. A building 10 feet bigger on all sides would've made all of the difference. You wouldn't be hearing so much about a new gym if our present one would've been built right in the first place.
Doing things right the first time is why the voters must be allowed to make the choice. That mean people have to be involved and that means the 72% of voters too apathetic to bother casting a ballot. If my father can risk his life driving in from the country to vote in the worst of weather, town people could've made it too.
Cut the waste, revise the plan, raise the money and put it to another vote. Until then do maintenance.