AEF offers Pay-Pal to fill cash gap at schools
By Mary Carey
Staff Writer
Published on May 11, 2007
After a proposed $5 million override failed in Shrewsbury on May 1, Nobel Prize winner Craig Mello wrote an email to fellow override supporters, urging them to "get back to work tomorrow."
He might have been talking to his override-supporting counterparts in Amherst.
"Sometimes easy success is a bad thing," Mello, a University of Massachusetts Medical School researcher suggested. "Easy success leads to complacency and sometimes prevents us from realizing our true potential."
Then he announced he and his wife are donating $30,000 to create a "citizens fund to fill the budget deficits that now loom so large."
In Amherst, where a proposed $2.5 million override failed the same day as Shrewsbury's, override supporters looking to form a citizens fund have turned to the Amherst Education Foundation, a local institution perhaps best known for sponsoring the annual Trivia Bee.
The most AEF has ever raised in a year, according to co-founder Jan Klausner-Wise, is $20,000. It proudly disbursed that amount this year, funding small requests of several hundred dollars or so each for school initiatives and projects.
This week alone, a pair of anonymous contributors donated $6,000. A couple in their 70s who donated $5,000 of the total, had approached Alice Swift, a longtime Town Meeting member, telling her they wanted to donate to the schools but didn't know where to do it. She recommended AEF.
Even people who didn't support the override, because they feared higher taxes would be a hardship for some people, have expressed interest in contributing to the schools, Swift said. They've told her their children got a great education in Amherst.
AEF board member Alison Curphey calls the $6,000 in post-override donations the "cornerstone" of the citizens' fund.
"It's a little bit like that phrase, 'the perfect storm,'" Curphey said. "You have a budget crisis, a failed override, then this energy from the folks who supported the override and have no clear sense of exactly where they need to go next with their money, but they want to donate."
AEF, as it happens, had been ramping up to expand its fund-raising efforts for almost a year. In addition to a change in name - it used to be called Amherst Area Education Alliance - AEF has upgraded its Web site (amhersteducationfoundation.org). Donors can now contribute directly through the site using Pay-Pal.
"The idea is not to supplant the municipal budget but to fund things that would never be part of the budget," Klausner-Wise said. Although the money could not be used to restore teaching positions, it could be used to buy library or computer supplies, for instance, so that money for those things could be freed up for other expenses.
Donors can contribute to exactly the project they want to such as school libraries or after-school tutoring services listed on the Web site or to the foundations's general fund. In the coming days, the site will also have a feature allowing donors to contribute to library, athletic and performing arts booster clubs.
Some enthusiasts writing on a popular parent listserv have suggested as much as $1 million could be raised to offset the coming budget cuts.
Klausner-Wise thinks that's a little high. But there is ample precedence for raising a lot of money. Boston has a multi-million dollar fund. Northampton created a $1 million endowment years ago, which produces thousands of dollars per year in interest.
"This is happening all over the state," Klausner-Wise said. "We are not the only community having problems funding our schools the way they need to be funded."
