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“Discretionary” money is a rare bird these days in the jungle of school finances. 

As the Berkeley Unified School District’s budget continues to shrink, central office staffers are doing all they can to pull in new state and federal grants to bolster the funding at various school sites. 

In some cases schools are entitled to state and federal money – based on enrollment and income levels – that comes earmarked for specific programs. In other cases, the district must file a competitive application, describing in minute detail what it plans to do with funds, and then wait with fingers crossed as the first day of school looms larger and larger on the horizon. 

But what about money for those ideas that teachers hatch over the summer? What about money for a “Classroom Publishing Center,” so students can truly grasp the power of the written word; or a few hundred dollars for a sculpture class that exposes students to an entirely different form of expression. 

How about field trips to Aquatic Park, the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, or the public library? How about $50,000 to support an unprecedented, community-driven effort to help failing high school freshman get back on track? 

Money for these kinds of things very likely would not exist if it were not for the Berkeley Public Education Foundation. 

The foundation was founded in 1983, just five years after Proposition 13 capped local property taxes, leaving parents and others to watch in despair as local school funding dried up. 

“If you think the (school) board meetings are tough today, they were pretty horrendous (in the early ’80s),” said Berkeley Public Education Foundation Executive Director Mary Friedman. 

Friedman witnessed the change as her three children passed through Emerson elementary school from 1973 to up until 1986. At the beginning of the period, Friedman said, “It was how a school is supposed to be.” There was art and music instruction twice a week for every class. There was a nurse and a P.E. specialist and more.  

By the mid-’80s, all of it had fallen victim to budget cuts. 

Friedman and a number of her friends got so fed up with watching the school board approve cut after cut that they decided to form the Berkeley Public Education Foundation.  

Although former school board member Steve Lustig helped spearhead the movement to launch the foundation, the level of public discontent with the school board ran so high at the time that Friedman et al decided to keep the foundation completely separate from the board. Its mission was to give direct support to Berkeley’s public school teachers, and show them how much they were appreciated by the community. 

In its first few years, the foundation was a modest affair. In the 1984-85 school year it gave away $6,684 to help schools buy extra books and begin to build “school gardens.” The following year the number doubled to $13,298, with the money going again towards books, maps and extra science equipment. 

For contributions, Friedman used any list she could get her hands on: lists of neighborhood residents; lists of parents at certain schools; lists of parents associated with particular sports teams. For an office, she used her dining room table. 

“It was very primitive,” Friedman said. 

But the money poured in at an increasing rate. The wake of Proposition 13 was so devastating, Friedman said, that all through the eighties there was a heightened awareness about the need to direct more money back into schools, in any way possible. When the state government gave a tax rebate in 1988, for example, the foundation raised $120,000 by asking people to hand their rebate checks over to the foundation. 

All around the state, “Local Education Foundations” like the Berkeley Public Education Foundation were popping up, giving the communities a way to come together and lend support to schools, whether financial or otherwise. 

“You had programs being cut that people really thought were important and were counting on,” said Susan Sweney, executive director of the California Consortium of Education Foundations. 

“Most of the foundations (there are over 400 in California today) got started with something being cut, or (people) wanting to do some creative, innovative things that they couldn’t do,” Sweney added. 

As the Berkeley Public Education Foundation grew, it took on a leadership role around issues of education in the community. When it looked like the district would have to go a year with no music program at all in the mid-’90s (until new funding kicked in through the Berkeley Educational Excellence Project (BSEP) parcel tax), the foundation raised $300,000 in six months and presented it to the school board. The program was saved. 

“That’s the best kind of campaign,” Friedman recalled with evident pride. “When you’re just looking at bridge funding.” 

A few years later, the foundation launched a campaign to raise the money needed to fully fund the district’s ambitious plans for the new Rosa Parks school, created through months of meetings and consultation with the people living in the neighborhood around the school.  

Before becoming involved in a project, Friedman said, “We need to see that the people who are going to benefit most directly are really committed.” 

Tapping foundations, businesses and individual donors, the Berkeley Public Education Foundation was able to raise the $1.1 million needed to move forward with the construction of Rosa Parks. 

The foundation has helped with other spontaneous fund raising campaigns over the years. It has grown from a organization of concerned outsiders to an organization that partners closely with the school board and even has an office in the district’s central administrative building. 

And all the while the foundation has continued to pump discretionary funding to Berkeley teachers, one at a time, for everything from Winter Mountaineering lessons, to a lesson meditating on “African Oral Tradition & Walt Disney.”  

In the 2000-2001 school year, the Berkeley Public Education Foundation contributed $717,209 in classroom grants, money for the Longfellow Theater remodeling, and money for the Berkeley High Health Center.  

The dollar amounts may not be staggering, but the base of community support that the foundation represents for school initiatives is invaluable, according to Sweney. 

“Really it isn’t a lot of money,” Sweney said. “What it is, is money that has no strings on it. It’s discretionary. That’s what makes it very powerful. 

“It’s money that allows a community to do something that they think is very important.”