The following letter was addressed to John Deasey, superintendent, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District). With two children currently attending Webster Elementary School, we are writing you to express our strongly held objection to the district’s proposal to divert our personal, private and voluntary contributions from our children’s school.
As with many families at Webster, we have a vested interest in the quality of education there and are very actively involved in helping to provide it. We currently contribute as much as we are able to Webster through our employer’s Community Support Campaign. Through our employer, we request and receive matching funds for the school. Additionally, we have sought and received funds paid directly to Webster from our employer’s charitable foundation. Beyond that, we contribute directly to various other Webster fund- raising events, contribute regularly in volunteer time to support various school activities, and volunteer two days a week at the school and in the classroom. Finally, we have also contributed in time and money to the initiatives supporting parcel taxes to support the district’s funding needs.
We are happy to be able to contribute but do so with the understanding that our contributions of our time and our money are going to the specific purposes we have chosen to support. We only do so with the knowledge and comfort that local people with whom we have direct relationships, ongoing communications, and shared desires for the substance of education at Webster exercise direct and responsible control over our contributed resources. These people include the PTA officers, teachers and administrators at Webster.
The concept that the district will now attempt to take a portion of our personal, specifically directed, and voluntary contributions for purposes not of our choosing, to be administered by people not at Webster with whom we do not share a relationship or any direct communications, and the net result of which will only diminish the impact of our contribution to the education of our children and reduce the quality of their education itself, is simply odious.
In effect, the district is telling us that we must contribute significantly more money only to maintain the net current financial support for Webster solely to fund a tariff to satisfy an arbitrary and discretionary administrative policy not mandated by law nor sanctioned by state policy. At our current contribution levels, the proposed diversion of funds would directly diminish the quality of our children’s education.
As elected officials with a charge to maximize the value of our children’s educational experience using the public tax funds, we view you as trustees for the benefit of the public good. As beneficiaries of private funds, voluntarily contributed to one of your schools, we view the school, its officers and the district as fiduciaries to apply those funds as intended by the donors, just as you are fiduciaries on behalf of the taxpayers in applying tax revenues pursuant to applicable law, regulations, or public policy.
However, the two roles are not identical. Our private donations are not for use for your discretionary administrative agenda. They are given for the purposes we select. The absurdity of the logic behind the district’s proposed diversion of private funds from one school to another would argue that the private contributed resources benefiting the entire Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District itself, in turn, should be depleted and controlled by people outside the district to support any or all public school districts with lesser means in the state.
We have little doubt that the net effect of this private funds’ diversion scheme (or tax) will actually reduce the private donations currently enjoyed within the district to the detriment of many of the children within the district, very possibly to the detriment of all the children within the district. If the objective of the district is to raise the level
of the lesser-endowed schools
(a laudable objective), then appropriate, straightforward approaches would be to solicit donations and support from individuals, foundations or other organizations that choose to contribute to such an effort on its merit or engage in other money raising activities. It should approach funds for discretionary agendas by sourcing them forthrightly and fairly rather than finessing the diversion of private donations at the expense of neighbors within the district.
It is simply neither appropriate nor productive to attempt to divert private and voluntary contributions for purposes for which they were not intended. We adamantly encourage the district to abandon this ill-conceived, expedient, arrogant, and counterproductive effort.
Ken and Kristina Peterson