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Part of the Solution
Public Education Fund's Bornick says businesses can walk - the walk to help make public schools better
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Business New Haven
1/22/2001
By: BNH
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Lydia Bornick just celebrated her first anniversary as executive director of the New Haven Public Education Fund, which seeks to encourage and enhance citizen participation in the public-school system.
What exactly does the New Haven Public Education Fund do?
It's a 15-year-old non-profit organization whose mission is to engage the public in advocacy to achieve quality public information.
What does that entail?
It means providing information and resources to all parts of the community that are necessary to have quality public education.
How did it get started?
It started as an initiative by a group of citizens in the mid-1980s amid national concerns about education. They looked at a variety of systems and then in 1986 went to the New Haven Foundation [now the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven] and asked for funding to start an initiative. The idea was to function as a sort of clearinghouse to achieve what I would call 'best practices' in education.
The name of the group makes it sound as though it's a pile of money.
The reason it kept the name was that several years after funding through the New Haven Foundation - and we still have an endowment fund placed there - the group decided to become its own 501(c)3 because the biggest part of its work was two mini-grants for excellence [by] teachers, so in some sense it could be called a fund. Today we would probably call it a network, because funding projects is only part of our work.
What are some current programs?
We continue to provide Requests for Proposals for teachers in the New Haven public schools. We [provide grants] only in New Haven. Teachers apply to us for mini-grants for classroom projects that enhance the curriculum mandated by the school system. We look for creative, innovative projects. It's also a way for the Public Education Fund to identify certain areas of need. For example, we get a lot of projects that deal with literacy. Those mini-grants are [typically] $500. A second grant program is our parent-involvement grants, which offers parents a way to become involved in the schools, primarily in the classrooms with teachers on projects parents can work on in support of curriculum. Another piece of our work that we're still engaged in even though we no longer receive funds for is the Library Power program. That began in 1993 when Vicki Parker-McDonald was director [of the fund]; Bill Day, who worked for the school system, wrote a grant to the DeWitt Wallace Readers Digest Fund for a three-year program to build library media centers in elementary and middle schools throughout the city. Since that original $1.2 million grant [the project] has received additional funding from the Community Foundation and the Caroline Foundation. The schools support it by [creating] a position for a library media specialist.
How much money passes through your organization in any given time period?
Over 15 years we have distributed through our grants programs about $2 million.
Besides the local foundations, where do you get money from?
We write grants to other foundations, and we've also had two very generous anonymous donors. So we've been very fortunate.
How is the organization governed, and how many people work for it?
We're a 501(c)3 with a board of directors and bylaws. I am a full-time executive director; we have a part-time position [to administer the teacher grants, and we are about to hire a part-time school-business partnership program associate to try to engage business with the schools.
Isn't there already a school-business partnership program?
We had a program called the School-Business Partnership Program which was given over to us in 1992 by the school system after the person who ran it [Linda Potter] left.
How does it work, and how many partnerships are there now?
We have about 80 partnerships that we know of. Partnerships [span the spectrum] from very little involvement to a lot of involvement. Some school-business partners have enormous involvement in the schools in terms of resources besides employees; others have employees who volunteer as tutors and mentors once a week. Then there are a lot of business that have expressed interest in being involved, but don't know how to go about it.
Which is why you're talking to me. So, how do they go about it?
Of course, they can call us. We have also just published a resource guide on how to get involved from, for example, having an employee come in to mentor a child one-on-one, to actually coming into a school and developing business-type skills in the classroom - talking to children about the workplace, engaging them in how your business runs. We also encourage 'externships' - we want our children to be able to go to work sites. February 2 is Job Shadow Day, a national effort organized by Junior Achievement where businesses allow young people to come in and actually move around the workplace.
Is there a way to measure how much impact you are actually having?
When young people graduate from our schools, at what level are they performing in the business community? Businesses ask us to produce an educated workforce. The measured outcome I would think is a productive [worker]. [Also,] the kids in these schools ought to be able to go on to further education, be it college or technical school or some type of training, and the way we think we can do it is to make business party to that.
What kind of grade would you give public education in New Haven today?
Well, as executive director, I'm prejudiced. I think that the school system is being asked to address an enormous number of issues. The resources to [address] individual issues are in some areas less, and in some areas more. The issue that they have paid enormous attention to in the year I've been here is literacy. In terms of school-business partnerships, I think they work very hard and do well in that area. [Public] education nationally is not performing well, and I don't think we're doing anything out of the ordinary to what our whole national picture is. I honestly see some incredibly hard-working teachers trying so hard at a really difficult job.
What proportion of grant proposals that you receive are you able to fund?
At least half, and sometimes more. We need to do outreach [to encourage] proposals, too, because we were without a director for some time, and we lost six months to a year. This past year we started to build up again. Then of course resources - we need more money coming in here to give it out. Not that money is the entire issue; if we build the right relationships, when teachers come to us we may be able to tie them into a resource that is in-kind, as opposed to money. We're trying to broaden that whole concept.
Are there groups similar to yours elsewhere?
Public education funds, PEFs, or local-education funds, LAFs, are part of a national movement, and there are similar groups all across the country. Traditionally, a lot of our sister institutions were [focused mainly on] grant-giving, as we were, but are now focusing more on educational forums, bringing experts to the community, looking at teacher standards, looking at accountability, standard tests - all of the issues that are important to [understand] why some failures have occurred in our education [system].
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