City Council - Regular Meeting

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Thank you everyone.

I'm an at-large city councilor and I'm also the chair of the Boston School Council Committee on Education. Oh my goodness, my daughter's calling me. Hold on one second. All right, I'm gonna pick up where I left off, okay? So for the record, my name is Julia Mejia. I'm an at-large city councilor and the chair of the Boston City Council's Committee on Education. Today is September 22nd, 2026, and the exact time is 2.04. In accordance with chapter two of the acts of 2025, modifying certain requirements of the open meeting law and relieving public bodies of certain requirements, including the requirement that public bodies conduct its meetings in a public place that is open and physically accessible to the public, the city council will be conducting this hearing virtually via Zoom. This hearing is being recorded. It is also being live streamed at boston.gov slash city dash council dash TV and broadcast on Xfinity channel eight, RCN channel 82 and files 964. Written comments may be sent to the committee email at ccc.educationatboston.gov. And it will be made part of the record and available to all counselors. Public testimony will be taken at the end of this hearing. Individuals will be called in the order in which they have signed up and will have two minutes to testify. If you wish to sign up for public testimony and have not done so, please email Central Staff Liaison, megan.kabinoffatboston.gov for the Zoom link and your name will be added to the list. Today's hearing is on docket 0406, an order for a hearing on the transparency and accountability of private fundraising in our Boston Public Schools. This matter was sponsored by yours truly, Councilor Julia Mejia, and was referred to the committee on February 25th, 2026. Today, I am joined by my colleagues in order of arrival with perfect attendance as always, Councilor Flynn, District 2. And we have one letter of absence from Councilor District 5, Councilor Enrique Pepin. So I'm going to just quickly start off with my opening remarks after my council colleagues go first. So Councilor Flynn, you now have the floor.

And thank you, Madam Chair. I want to say thank you to you, Madam Chair, for bringing this forward. I also want to say thank you to the people that are about to testify their important work as well. I'm here to learn more about the subject and will hold off on giving a formal opening statement. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Councilor Flynn. So I just wanna thank everyone for joining us today, especially the experts, the advocates and members of the administration. As we know, the BPS budget has increased every year, yet many schools and educators continue to struggle getting basic supplies in their classrooms. The district claims to ensure that students have equitable access to quality education and experiences. And yet we have seen again and again how BPS budget does not reflect that. We have schools that receive hundreds and thousands of dollars more than other BPS schools across the street. And this is not equity. Furthermore, many of these schools receive little to no supplementary budgetary support and already under-resourced and have high number of high needs students. We cannot claim to be equitable if these disparities in private donations and fundraising alone automatically contradicts this. We recognize the way that the new reimagined school funding formula has tried to become more equitable, but it is not perfect. When educators resort to donor choose or GoFundMe for teachers and schools asking for school supplies and knee pads for volleyball teams, it's obvious that there's a serious discrepancy between what the district believe is equitable and the lived experiences of our students and educators. Today, we hope to get a better understanding of how the district considers private dollars in our schools when thinking about funding schools and how we can better support our schools and families in under-resourced schools. We also must be more transparent around private funding in the district. We appreciate additional funds from community members and donors, but we need to have a better understanding of how those finances support each school. Today we'll have three panels in the following order, experts, advocates, and the administration. And since there are three panels, we'll only have one round of questions per panel. The hearing will finish with public testimony so that they can respond to everything that we have heard today. Thank you to the administration for being here. And we look forward from hearing from you today and working together alongside you. And I'll just say as a BPS graduate and as a BPS mom and as a BPS advocate, I think this is one of the most important issues when we're thinking about funding because there is this mentality of the haves and the have-nots and the students who are in under-resourced schools are the ones that are experiencing the greatest need. And so my hope is that we can figure out how we can get a handle on this and more importantly, what we're going to do to fix it.

So with that, I am going to turn it over to- Councilor Mejia, sorry, Madam Chair, I just wanted to announce that I've also been here from the beginning and Councilor Weber is also here. So I don't need to give an opening. Just wanted to mark my presence. Thank you.

Same here, Chair. I just wanted to, feel free to move on without openings for me.

Okay, sorry. I was on my phone. I did not notice. I didn't scroll down. So thank you, Councilor Weber and Councilor Lujan for joining us. With all of that said, we'll kick it over to our experts. So, and to be honest with you, we have our first expert. Let me go, where's my sheet, sorry. Going back to the official here. So we have Mark. Oh, Lord. Mark, you're gonna have to help me with your last name. Traeger? Mark Traeger, right? Okay, English is my second language and I got that one right, so thank you. And you are a former New York City Council member. And then we also have Travis Marshall. And we'll begin with you, Mark. You now have the floor.

Thank you. Thank you all so much. And good afternoon. And I have to say, as a former history teacher, much love and appreciation for the beautiful city of Boston and all the great public servants and families. So much love from New York to Boston. My name is Mark Trager. I am a former New York City public school teacher and former member of the New York City Council. And I also chaired the committee and education and city council. I want to begin with why I pursued and also thank you for opportunity to testify. I want to begin with why I pursued fundraising transparency in the 1st place. Because for me, this was never simply a data exercise. This was directly from what I experienced as a teacher and a member of the city council while I was teaching. I was also attending grad school at night at Brooklyn College to become a school administrator. And in those classes, I heard from classmates describe the extraordinary supplemental resources available in some of their schools through parent fundraising, enrichment programs, additional clubs, arts programs, field trips, academic support, and other opportunities that extended well beyond what the school system itself was providing. At the same time, The school where I was teaching had to cut its debate team because we didn't have sufficient funding to sustain it. That contrast stayed with me. These are all New York City public school students. They're all part of the same school system. Yet the range of opportunities available to them could differ dramatically based not on their potential or ability or ambition, but on the fundraising capacity of the families in their school community or based upon their zip code. Years later, when I represented the community of Coney Island in southern Brooklyn, and other working class neighborhoods in the city council, I saw the same inequity from a broader perspective. I saw schools in my district creating GoFundMe pages simply to support student clubs and basic enrichment opportunities. At the same time, I was hearing about schools in wealthier zip codes in New York where private fundraising could support extraordinary programming, international travel, and other opportunities that were simply unimaginable to many of the students I represented. I want to be very clear about this from the onset. Parent generosity was never the problem. It's not the problem. Parents who are able positioned to give their time, energy and resources to support their schools should be absolutely commended. The public policy problem arises when privately raised resources begin producing profoundly different educational experiences within the same public school system, while government fails to fully measure, disclose or respond to that disparity. That was the purpose of my legislation. And it is important to understand what the bill did and what it did not do. We were not creating a new financial reporting system from scratch. The chancellor's regulations already required. Parent associations and to maintain financial records and provide financial information. The Department of education was already collecting much of this data. My legislation simply required that this information be made public. Transparency was the objective. There was understandable concern from some communities. With significant fundraising capacity, some folks asked, what is the end game? Are you going to cap fundraising? Are you going to redistribute redistribute dollars? And the answer was always no, the legislation did not. you know, redistribute resources or funds. It did not limit fundraising. It did not punish any types of successful fundraising efforts. It simply and solely required disclosure. And what that disclosed revealed was striking. In the first year of public reporting, over 24 PTAs reported raising over at least a million dollars. But the other side of that data was also important. Hundreds of schools, hundreds of schools, either reported no fundraising at all or failed to submit the required information that raised a second and equally important equity question. Did every school actually have an active functioning parent organization with the institutional support necessary to succeed? Some school communities have families with flexible work schedules, professional fundraising experience, extensive extensive networks and significant disposable income. Other families may be working multiple jobs, confronting language barriers, caring for children or loved ones, or simply have never been given the infrastructure or support needed to build a strong parent organization. None of that means they care any less about their children. and we should never confuse fundraising capacity with parental commitment. That is why I pressed the DOE here in New York City on whether every PTA and PA should receive a baseline level of support. At our hearing, I asked whether the system had historically provided every parent organization with some base amount of funding and support, DOE cannot point to such a policy. For me, that became a very central, one of the lessons from the law. The objective was never to lower the ceiling for PTAs, it was to raise the floor for everyone else. If one school can raise more than a million dollars while another school cannot sustain basic parent programming or may not even have a fully functioning organization, the answer is not to simply punish what's working, it's to lift up, to address what's not working. Uh, that can include resources for training, organizational support, helping with language access, help navigating the school system within baseline resources. So that a vibrant parent organization does not depend entirely on the wealth or professional networks for particular zip code. The law just to summarize the law had ultimately 3 important effects. 1st, it transformed an anecdotal conversation into an evidence based 1. 2nd, it revealed that the inequity was not only about dollars. It was also about organizational capacity and whether all families had equal support to participate meaningfully and fully in school life. And 3rd, it created lasting public accountability. New York City continues to publish this information annually. Transparency alone does not eliminate inequity, but it changes the quality and the substance of the conversation. You cannot responsibly address a disparity that you refuse to measure. And you cannot have a serious conversation about educational opportunity while leaving a significant source of educational resources outside public view. One of the most important lessons I carried with me from this classroom into public office is this. Talent is distributed across every neighborhood. Opportunity is not. The responsibility of a public school system is to narrow that gap, not to obscure it. Thank you for the opportunity to share my experience here in New York City.

Thank you, Mark. And my sister's also a New York public school teacher. She teaches at aviation. And she's also a union rep and is doing the good work. So thank you for your service and for being here today. All right, I'm gonna go over to Travis and then after Travis, we'll go for our first round of questions. So my colleagues just get ready. to dive in. Okay, Travis, you now have the floor.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, and thank you, councillors, for being here, and members of the administration, and Mr. Traeger, of course. My name is Travis Marshall. I live in Roslindale. I am the proud parent of two Boston Public Schools students, one at English High School, one at New Mission. And I'm also a member of Quality Schools for Every Student Quest, which is a grassroots group of parents in the district. I personally first came to this issue over the course of my six years acting as treasurer of the family council at my kid's former elementary school. We typically raised money for pizza parties, field trips, winter clothing drives, and extracurricular programs like music. When soliciting donations from local businesses, though, it always sort of felt like schools were in competition with each other over things like restaurant gift certificates or sports tickets that we could raffle as fundraisers. Quest first came into this work after a 2018 Ernst & Young audit of individual school accounts. This was the first and only time there has been a district-wide snapshot of school accounts outside of the budget. Quest used that data to compare school fundraising levels across the district. And we found that this fundraising varied widely between schools. Some had 501c3 organizations and development programs, with a few elementary schools raising half a million dollars a year and some high schools raising millions. And others sold candy bars and wrapping paper through their school parent councils for a few hundred. Some schools fund administrative positions, surround care, and world language classes, while others fundraise for winter coats. And what we learned as we dug in was we learned that this phenomenon is pretty common in public school districts around the country. And we set out to learn more about this work in other cities and towns, from Portland, Oregon, to New York City, as well as locally in Newton and Wayland, Massachusetts. We had conversations with local parent groups and school district representatives. And it was through these conversations in New York that we met my fellow panelists, former New York City Councillor Mark Trager. As each year passed from that 2018 audit, however, our data became older and more out of date. We updated what we could from the IRS filings that tax exempt organizations are required by law to file. but that left out the majority of other schools without 501c3s. Thanks to Councilor Louis-Jean, we connected with Pamela Lyons, the Executive Director of the Boston Education Development Fund. BEDF has long acted as a fiscal sponsor for school groups that don't have their own tax exempt status, and she helped us get a fuller picture of the schools that they hold accounts for. So this stream of money is really a black box for BPS. Unlike the budget, which is publicly debated at school committee and voted upon in public by the school committee and the city council, there is no public record of how private money works in BPS. And we're not talking about the grants that are voted upon by the school committee. These are school parent councils and friends of organizations that are affiliated with specific schools. Superintendent Circular FIN21 on BPS-recognized 501c3 organizations states that all tax-exempt school organizations must prove a strong rationale for the need for a separate independent 501c3 and must update BPS on current details including board structure, status, and operating revenue. We've contacted the finance office and BPS and received information from them, but based on the information they gave us, we believe we have a much fuller picture than BPS does. We also believe that this information should not be a black box. We recommend that BPS create a dashboard that is updated annually for all funding sources and expenditures so that the funding of our public schools remains transparent to stakeholders and to taxpayers. Caregivers should have access to this information when they make decisions about before and after school programs, as well as what extra funds and programs are available at various schools. And this is exactly what New York City did, as Councillor Traeger just explained, with Local Law 171. I appreciate you holding this hearing, Madam Chair, and I look forward to answering any questions from you and your colleagues. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Travis. And I'm happy to see Pamela Lanes here. Definitely one of the gems in helping to support so many of our Boston Public Schools. So thank you for being here, Pamela, and all that you do. I'm going to go to my council colleagues for their first round of questions, and then I'll end with mine. In order of arrival, I believe it was Councilor Flynn, followed by Councilor Louis-Jean, and then Councilor Weber. So, Councillor Flynn, you now have the floor and five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to the panel for being here. I listened closely to Councillor Traeger. I listened closely to Travis as well. I have a couple of questions for both. Councillor Traeger, you mentioned, if I heard you correctly, that the New York City Post this information each year about private fundraising. Is that accurate?

Yes, Councillor. As a result of my bill passing into law, the public school system is now required to annually disclose PTA fundraising on an annual basis and post it on their website, correct?

Okay, that's pretty impressive. I'd love to see something like that in Boston, um. And into all schools are all schools required, even though it is the law are all schools still required to. Submit that information in the proper format.

So, so you counselor, uh. In the public school system here in New York City. All PAs or parent associations and PTAs were already required before the passage of my law by Chancellor's regulations, which are regs that govern the public school system, to report any fundraising activity to the central office. So even before my bill became law, the central office already was responsible to collect this information and have it internally. What my bill did was make this public. So yes, every year they're still required to report data centrally, and then central makes the information public, sir.

Thank you. Let me go to Travis. Travis, listening to the counselor, is that something that you're striving to do, is to include that type of transparency and accountability? over to BPS. Is that ultimately your goal?

Yeah, thank you, Counselor. That's exactly, I think, what we're advocating for is because there is no central database of this information. It's all in silos here and there. And, you know, other than BEDF, which held a number of school accounts under its portfolio, the remaining schools that don't have accounts with them or the schools that have their own tax exempt organizations, these are all scattered around and the data is not public and certainly not easily accessible by a parent in the district.

So, Travis, the data is not public, but are they still sending the data to BPS or or do some schools send it and some schools not participate? Do you have any idea?

I think that's probably a good Mr. David Bloom, who I believe is on the administration panel, can speak to that better. The superintendent circular does does specify that schools should be sending the 513s should be sending that information to BPS. But the information that we, the list of schools, 501c3s that the administration was able to provide us did not have any of the actual financial data. It just had the list of the schools that have their own tax exempt organizations.

Okay. And maybe one question, one final question to the council again. So, Mark, is that information readily available to the public and easy to access? look at format on social media? Is it easy for parents or anyone in the public to look at it and find out exactly what's happening in their school?

Yes, City Councilor. The DOE is required to post it on its website in easily defined. And the reason why we know it's still working is because almost every year the media in New York City will get Get a hold of that data once it's on the website and there's usually new stories that come from that because we still have a situation where, you know, about 24 schools, you know, raised about a million dollars or more. Uh, over 40 schools raised over 500,000, and then over 370 schools reported no income at all. Uh, and so there are some very deep, deep disparities. Also, some serious questions to the here in New York City about. Why do we have so many schools with no active PA or PTA at all, separate and apart from the money? What's happening or what's not happening at this school? And what are they doing to provide base level support to help families organize there? So yes, sir, it's made available on the website, public facing.

Well, thank you, Councillor, and thank you, Travis. And I respect the work that your colleagues, Mark, were able to accomplish. It seems like it's about transparency. It seems like it's about accountability. I also support what Travis is trying to do as well. But I do find it remarkable that New York City is able to do that. I say that in a complimentary way. I don't think we're even close to being where you guys are, but I do think in the interest of transparency and accountability. I think BPS families and the BPS community would like to receive that type of information, just my own opinion. Madam Chair, thank you very much.

Thank you, Councilor Flynn, and I want to acknowledge that we've also been joined by Councilor Culpepper, and we're doing questions in the order of arrival. So we have Councilor Louis-Jean up next, followed by Councilor Weber and then Councilor Culpepper. Councilor Louis-Jean, you now have the floor in five minutes.

Thank you, Councilor Mejia, and thank you to everyone for being here. Apologies that I'm not on camera having technical difficulties, but I wanted to start off with Councilor Traeger, former Councilor Traeger, thank you for being with us. Can you tell me when was your bill enacted into law?

This was before the pandemic in 2018. Notice how my mind works that way, pandemic, post-pandemic, but this was enacted back in 2018.

Thank you. And so we went from a period in New York City of not having transparency around that to having transparency. Was it a complete black box beforehand?

So we knew that centrally the DOE held on to this information. But it was like pulling teeth at times to get it out. And we had, you know, some PTAs share stories about what they raised. And so it was largely anecdotal, city councilor. And the purpose of the bill was to move from anecdotes to evidence-based transparency and decision-making when it comes to fundraising here.

And were all the PTAs and associations, were they all organized as 501c3s?

Not every, no, not everyone, but one of the biggest things that I didn't expect to get out of the bill, which was eye-opening for my colleagues and stakeholders, was the fact that we had over 300 schools that reported no activity whatsoever. I didn't expect that. We didn't know that. 300 out of how many? Out of over 1,600 schools in New York City. That's a significant number. And we had no idea that we had so many inactive or nothing whatsoever. And so that put pressure on the DOE to start rolling up their sleeves to figure out what's happening, what's not happening at those school communities, how to better support families. But some folks had different structures, but they were still required to report the fundraising and that type of spending to the DOE central, our bill just simply forced it to become public.

Thank you. And if they weren't organized as 501c3s, what was their structure?

Some schools had like parent associations, you know, again, each school kind of created its own kind of structure where some, it just, it varied sometimes city council from school.

So like sometimes very informal, like maybe a parent who had like, who like took all the money and did X, Y, Z, for example.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, but I will tell you that the bill forced these types of conversations because we didn't know a lot about this. We only learned about it after the bill was passed. So this will generate those types of great conversations and that transparency as well.

Thank you, and I like that Travis had mentioned connecting to Pamela Lanes over at BDF. Is there something similar to BDF in NYC that acts as a fiscal sponsor for schools that want to do similar, that want to do fundraising?

I'm sorry, I missed that, City Councilor.

Is there something similar in New York City as a BEDF, Pamela Lane's organization, where they can act or they act as a fiscal sponsor for schools that want to do or engage in fundraising?

And don't have a structure, so I'm not as familiar with, but I am familiar when, in the New York City system, we have something called. Face family and community engagement division within the central office. It's a very big priority office within the central office. That's the chance for overseas and. They're supposed to be the central or main touch point for parents, associations, PTAs, CECs, and family groups to provide that type of base level support. If there's a family that needs to help or parents that need help to organize or have any types of basic questions, we have this face unit within central that's supposed to be a support for them to provide technical assistance, back office support as well. So I hope that addresses your question.

It does. It sounds like it's a little different, but I have one, I think, final question for you. What have, so the legislation passed in the pre-COVID area, what have you seen as a tangible result of sort of the transparency of that information between that time in 2018 to now? Like, what have the practical results been?

Well, I love that question because my final budget, uh, before I term limited out of city council. And, uh, was I was told, for example, the New York City school funding formula that we use in public school in the New York City school system is called fair student funding formula. It's a city created formula and how we resource our schools. And, uh, when I took. When I joined as chair of the committee, most of our schools were nowhere near 100% of receiving that formula, the funding promised by that formula. When we got support from the pandemic and some support from Albany and so forth, every single school received 100% of its fair student funding. And where we gave school communities the ability to invest where they needed to invest in. And 1 of the goals that we had, but again, it's up to the school community to the principal and the school community there was to. Increase the base level of support for family engagement and this is where I will say. There's no mission accomplished banner here in New York City either. There's still a lot more work to do to provide much, much more targeted support, much more support to activate more and, but I would say number 1, it was a major talking point in our budget fight to provide more resources to public schools. Number 2. We now have no more anecdotes. Now we have evidence, we have full transparency, and it's an organizing tool for policymakers, for parents and families to demand more from the DOE to say, how do you level the playing field? How do we make sure that all of our kids

And the DOE, just to be clear, is the Statewide Department of Education?

Oh, my apologies. So, no, it's a great question. So we have the New York City public school system, which is, we also call it the New York City DOE. And so apologies on that. This is the local school district that governs New York City.

Thank you. I think I have further questions, but I, sorry, Travis, but thanks for your work, Travis. I think Councilman, he's telling me that I'm out of time. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor Luis-Jean. All right, so we wanna be equitable here and I want my colleagues to think I'm giving you more than I did others. Because I know Councilor Culpepper is always checking the clock.

I respect time.

So I'm gonna go to a Councilor. I also want to acknowledge that we have been joined by Councilor Fitzgerald. So in the order of arrival, Councilor Fitzgerald, just so that you know it's Councilor Weber, then followed by Councilor Culpepper, then yourself, and then it will be me. All right, Councilor Weber, you now have five minutes on the floor.

Okay, thank you very much, Travis. Very nice to see you. I guess, so for Mark Traeger, I'm born in New York. My mom was a special ed teacher in the Bronx for 30 years. And so I'm just thinking, so here, I'm not sure how this plays out for private fundraising when you have a specialty school, like we have the Boston Arts Academy here. My aunt is from Forest Hills, Queens. She went to the High School of Performing Arts in New York. How do you think of Those schools, I feel like, need sort of specialized sources of funding in a way that's different than those other schools. We can't build the special theaters and art studios there. We don't have those resources. Did that come up in your discussions in New York about how that would impact a school like the High School of Performing Arts or other schools like that if they're...

Well, 1st city counselor, thank you for your family for your great for your great service. What I'll say is that. The bill was pretty simple in the sense where. If the school is already required by existing chances regs. To report centrally what their fundraising is. We're just saying, make it public. So if regardless of what school. If you're if you're governed by the chances regulations to disclose that information centrally, we just wanted to see it publicly. We did, as I mentioned in my opening testimony, there were some concerns or some feedback we received from some school communities. particularly those that we're raising quite a bit for supplemental opportunities and services for kids and families and school communities. And I made it very clear from the get-go that my objective Was just simply just transparency and to ultimately use it as a leverage tool to the, to the central system to the, to the mayor to the chancellor to say, what are you doing to help level the playing field in terms of increasing base level support across all of our, all of our school communities. What I, what I will re up against city council or Weber is that what I did not expect. Uh, which became very as much important to me as not just the money, but the piece, but also just. The just no structure, uh, that the deal we was helping support or establish in over 370 schools, uh, out of a system of about 1600, where there was just virtually no activity. We had no idea what's going on. Um, and that's unacceptable. Uh, because to me, they have, we have an obligate as a former teacher, and I'm sure I'm speaking amongst folks who agree. Families getting families involved in any any way is so critical to an education. And the fact that we had no information whatsoever about what's happening at hundreds of our schools. Was unacceptable to me, and that's what forced the conversation centrally to better support that they staffed up face, which is that family and community engagement division in central. They staffed it up. To provide more outreach, more support, and ultimately, I still think where there's much more work to do is we need more base level support to and I know that there's some title 1 regulations that require some money to go to parent groups within a school community. If you're a title 1 school, but that's nowhere near enough, sir. We need much more work to do on that front.

Okay. And then I guess, how did it work with your bill and the exam schools? Like did Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, Hunter, I don't know, did they have their own sources of funding?

Yeah. So all the schools that submit fundraising reports to Central had to disclose what their numbers were.

Again- And I guess, what did you find?

Well, I don't have the Stuyvesant data up in front of me, but what we did find is that in some of the wealthier parts of the city, we had over close to two dozen schools raising at least over a million dollars in certain pockets of the city. And the DOE testified, because I asked them, what could schools use that money on? And that funded supplemental art music, that funded trips to Europe and around the world, clubs galore, a number of enrichment opportunities for kids and families. And again, that's great. But why is it that in my district, Schools had to use a Go fund me page to start a dance club in Coney Island. That was unacceptable to me. And that's where we had to leverage that in the budget conversations with the system to provide more support to schools that don't have. You know, that type of fundraising capacity.

I guess, could I just so when you're saying that the data showed in, like, so you're on the Upper West Side and there's whatever, you know. Ps who, like, that school could raise more money, but was that also happening at the high school. Level for, like, the exam schools versus the non exam or.

yeah i mean you know we saw that there are pockets of the city where those schools you know exist uh some where some of those schools exist where they had significant capacity to raise large sums of money and that's separate and apart from any foundations some some of these schools also have alumni foundations that supplement what you're speaking about which is also uh you know that's a separate pot of money but that's that's their own their their own regulations But, yeah, sir, they, we, but we expected. Some of that, and that's what we wanted to see in the bill. What we didn't expect. And which was critically important to us as well was hundreds of schools reporting nothing whatsoever. And that was eye opening for us in the city council. Thank you.

Thank you. And Councilor Weber, I'm sorry.

No problem.

Thank you.

Thank you. And before I move on to the next person lined up, I'm just curious, Councilor Traverger, did you at the time when you were the chair of education, did you oversee the education budget, which is why you were far more intimate with the inner workings?

Yeah, so in addition to being the chair of the education committee, I was also a member of what's called the city council budget negotiation team, which helped negotiate the budget. Uh, with, uh, with, with, with our speaker at the time, and dealing with the mayoral mayoral administration at the time. Yes.

Okay, so you had a seat at the table. That's great. and the data now to work with. Great, thank you for that. I'm gonna move on next to Councilor Culpepper, followed then by Councilor Fitzgerald, and then my round of questions. Councilor Culpepper, you now have the floor in five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for holding this important and informative hearing. And Councilor, I just have a couple of questions. Did you send us that, do we have that legislation that you filed and that was passed?

Do we have a copy of it? I'm happy to forward to the chair and the chair. Absolutely, sure.

And so did different schools have either a person dedicated to just doing fundraising or did they have a fundraising department or did they hire private fundraising? What were the different iterations of how the funds were raised?

Well, I'll tell you, City Councilor, that's a great question because the bill revealed the different structures that you're speaking about. Because again, all we had prior to the bill was the expectation and hearing anecdotes about some schools raising tons of money, some schools having nothing or something in between and not knowing all the different structures. And so but but in the chancellor's regulations that predate my bill being passed into law, there was a requirement that whether you have a PTA or a PA a parent association, a parent organization within your school community, if you're raising money, you have to report it in. Whatever the structure is, if you're raising money working with the school, with the school community, this is not, you know, if you start a nonprofit organization in the community separate from the school, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about school-based fundraising. then you were required by regulations to report that information to the central office. We, as city council members, wanted to have access to that data. The DOE initially did not want to share a list, so we had to pass a bill to force them to disclose it.

And did they report the structure of the actual fundraising organism?

Yes, well, they broke it down, whether it was a, whether it's a, or some parent structure we learned after after we learned that. Hundreds of schools had no activity whatsoever. We learned that some parents, some families. Uh, needed some support from in terms of establishing what structure they wanted to structure. Some of them said, we didn't know how to submit it. We didn't know who to submit it to. It generated a whole bunch of conversations and very revealing information about the structures that you're speaking about, where they needed to kind of professionalize or. Get professional support from the, which they were not getting before and that's why, sir, I will say. They had to staff up the family and community engagement division called face in central in light of this bill, because we realized the extent of the problem of how many families in school communities who needed that the type of back office institutional support.

Did the bill require that they. Once a bill was filed and passed, did it require that they follow a certain structure in order to do the fundraising, or did you continue to allow them to do it as best they could?

The bill simply said, DOE, make public what you have. Um, that's that's that was the beauty of the bill. It was solely a transparency bill. Remember also, sir, in New York, New York, we have something called mayoral control where. We cannot force in a city council in New York City. They cannot force substantive policy changes because the state of New York grants that power to the mayor and to the chancellor. But what we do have the power to do is to make information public to report data. So it was a reporting bill. forcing them to disclose the numbers that they already had centrally.

So if a school brought on pro bono a private fundraiser, they could continue to use that fundraiser to raise the funds so long as they reported what they raised to you.

My sense is that the school would, I could speak about New York City, so forgive me. But my sense is if a school did something like that, it would be also best to check in with the administration, superintendent's office to make sure that, and FACE, which is that family engagement division, to make sure that it's fully in compliance with all of the regulations and rules. But yeah, I mean, anything, I'm sure, by the way, the job of FACE, is to provide that type of support where you wouldn't need to have a consultant or an outside person coming in to help and assist you. There's a very, there's an office and division within the central and DOE and New York City public school system that's specifically designed for this type of support for parents and families in the school community, sir.

And so what does FACE stand for?

What does that acronym stand for? It stands for Family and Community Engagement.

Okay, that's the one. Okay. And so the schools that

You saw the hundreds of schools. This would be your last question.

Okay. The hundreds of schools that you saw weren't raising money. Was there any incentive or any way they now saw that maybe we should begin to raise money and they started raising money?

So, I will say that there were a variety of reasons why we were told why they didn't disclose anything or nothing was disclosed against in some cases. They had information internally. They didn't know how to. Send it in. They didn't know who to speak to. So there was a breakdown in communication. Some schools had absolutely no formal structure activity whatsoever, which again, to me is unacceptable. Yeah. And so there were a variety of reasons why they reported zero. But just, I want to re-up this point, very important to me. Just because a school reported zero or reported no structure doesn't mean the families don't care, didn't care. There's a variety of reasons why that happened, most of which is not the parents' fault. It's the fault of the central system that failed to adequately support that school community. Thank you, Councillor.

Appreciate it. Great information. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Culpepper. I'll move on next to Councillor Fitzgerald. You now have the floor.

Thank you chair and thank you everyone to be on the panel today. Um, just a couple of questions. I'm looking at, uh. the education funds, Boston Education Funds website, Pamela. So just a quick question to you and hello to my high school classmate as well. I'm reading here under the fiscal sponsorship services. It says BEDF also provides fiscal sponsorship services, including general management, financial administrative staffing, and fundraising services to privately funded programs in order to maximize their operating capacity, facilitate their timely invitation, ensure proper compliance, et cetera. Privately funded programs is that is the majority of that. The parent councils for you, or is that are you finding that there's other private funders that you offer these fiscal services to.

Wait, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt Councilor Fitzgerald, but Pamela is not on this panel. And I know that Councilor Traeger has a hard stop. So we wanna make sure that we get through the first round of questions for both Councilor Traeger or Travis, but- I apologize that.

Pamela, I apologize. I saw you on there, so I thought it was all, and I thought we were just one panel here.

Not yet. Not yet. Sorry. So sorry, Councillor Fitzgerald. If you could direct questions to Councillor Traeger and Travis for this first round, that would be good. Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you, Councillor. Thank you, Travis, for being here. Let me ask, when you took this accounting in, were individuals represented and how much they may have donated to a PTA? Or was it just the bulk number? Was it just the final number at the end of the school raised $1,000? Or was it the school raised $100 from Jimmy, $100 from Tommy, $100 from Billy, et cetera?

So, great question. Let's see counselor. So what we wanted to, we wanted to make the bill as simple and easy as possible. And what that what that means is that. Whatever was already required by our regulations in the public school system with regards to any fundraising activity, any fundraising activity in New York City, public schools has to be reported to central. That's minus. That's minus my log. That's already the system, right? My bill simply said. Central deal, we make that make those numbers public per school on an annual basis. That was it.

Prior to prior to your bill, what was there are individuals reported and the contribution that they made. So, if a parent decided to give a 1M dollars, would it would that would it just say we have a 1M or would it say so and so gave a 1M and that was on the public record.

uh parents and families have an option to disclose when it comes to their own individual ptas how their money if if someone wants to anonymously donate a million dollars to a school they could do that but um those that that type of level of detail is controlled by central what was made public sir was not the names of who gave it was just the amounts

Yeah. No, I just wonder if that was part of the process regardless. And maybe some of the positives and negatives that could come off of, you know, you would hate to dissuade people from contributing because they know their name might be on a list for all to see. Another question, was there any unintended consequences of all this data out there of the schools that may have raised more versus the schools who didn't have any? And I don't know how it works exactly in New York public schools, but right in Boston, there's some choices of where you can go. And did it, I worry that, does it give any favorability to what, oh, I looked at the numbers and the PTA doesn't raise much at that school. And, you know, we can see what is offered. And so they can't do X, Y, and Z, but over here does. And all of a sudden there's sort of a rush to, you know, one school has the upper hand over the other and families might feel like they're getting A short end of the stick, so to speak, you know what I mean?

No, I appreciate the question. I would say the biggest takeaway for me that. We didn't see coming was the fact that we had over 370 schools reporting nothing. Yeah, no activity and that is unacceptable to me, sir. And that's not on them. That's on the central system. Uh, they knew, I mean, it made me question how long did you know this for? What was the game plan to to to turn this around? Um, and and that to me was unacceptable. But as far as the way we resource schools, we still resource them the same as far as. Every kid, whether you're in South Brooklyn, where I live, or Upper West Side, you're funded the same funding formula. If you're a kid with special needs, you might get some more funding and so forth. But. I would just say the biggest takeaway for me was the fact that hundreds of schools had no activity whatsoever.

Yeah, understood and that result and well, I guess what you're saying, if any privately funded, but you're not saying was it equally distributed to each school in your in the school district. Or, you know, because what I'm trying to figure out is where their difference in the results from an education standpoint and. Hey, here is a school that might have had some wealthy parents in it, and they funded the PTA greatly, and they were able to do so much more stuff. And we saw results different in the child's education versus the schools that maybe had zero activity, 300 schools that had zero activity and the results from an academic point of view on how it affected them.

Well, what a question I mean, I am a former answer that question as a former teacher to that resources absolutely do matter in many, many ways. When I took my students, I took governments in my final couple of years before I jumped the city council. When I took my students to Washington, D. C. Um, that was a game changing experience for them. Um, and we're able to, you know. The school thankfully had due to my advocacy some, a budget to take kids on some, some trips. Um, there are some kids in my former district in Coney Island. That largely never left their zip code never saw a museum in Manhattan. Right? That was unacceptable to me. So, yes, sir, I would say that those resources make a very big difference in the lives of those kids and families. And also the fact that they were also used to supplement art music after school programs. It's not just about the trips. It's about so much. So many programs and opportunities that really keep kids in school and to retain them into into advanced academic success as well. Sir.

Thank you. I know that's my time too. I just think I wanted to just make the point of if we have schools that are privately funded. And allow more access to more things in the way that the Boston public school system works as we know you could. You know, some schools might be more favor to others and, you know, I'd hate to see any school lag behind, but I understand. Also, it's about the parents investing in their school and it's kind of luck of the draw of who you get and who can raise what and organize around what so. It's difficult, but thank you all for your time. Really appreciate it. And Pam, I won't be around for the 2nd panel. I'm sorry. I'll just text you. All right. Thank you guys.

Do you wanna answer the question, Pamela, now? Just, and no one, I'm not playing favoritism, but since Councilor Fitzgerald's not gonna be here, give me a minute's time. Pamela.

I'm happy to answer. So the majority of the funding that we hold is all philanthropic. We have been supporting parent councils if they choose to. That's actually an effort that we've really been focused on doing in the past two years or so, kind of we opened the doors to support parent councils so the majority of the funding that we have is really to um has been at the local school and department level but we do have councils that we support and we're trying to bring on more just to be able to give them that um that overall foundational support where we see there's like a big inequities as well great thank you for answering that uh thank you chair i appreciate the extra time i really do

You're welcome, don't say I never gave you anything. All right, let's go to, it's my turn, I believe. So, Councilor Traeger, I'm just curious, what challenges did you face in writing and passing this piece of legislation Specifically, kind of what was the responses from the stakeholders, educators, district leaders, students, community members? And the reason why I ask is because change is never easy. And I'm sure there were some folks who were uber enthusiastic about this and others were like, why do you want to be all up in my business? So I'm just curious if you don't mind kind of helping to paint a picture. And the reason why I asked this question is because we do have a lot of followers on our Instagram, and these are the sort of conversations that we really want parents to understand are happening and the role that they can play in shifting policy. So if you could just talk to us a little bit about your experience.

That's a really great question. So I received some... Some concerns from some school communities where. Fundraising was pretty successful asking about, you know, what does this mean for their school communities? Are you going to look to cap how much we can give? Are you going to look to redistribute resources? And that was that was not the intention of my bill was simply just to have full transparency about fundraising and. I also wanted to note that there was, it was already a kind of against chances regulations to even do something like that anyway. And so no 1 was pursuing those types of changes when I was pushing my bill. We also received. Some internal, I would say. Conversations or some level of concerns from the, from the as well, saying that whenever you pass a reporting bill that forces them to disclose information that, um, you know, it, it costs money for them to do that. My response to that was like. Respectfully, you're already required by your own rules to collect this information. All you're doing is making the Excel chart public on your website that you already pay for anyway. So this, this is not a major cost. This is not a major burden of any kind, because technically your own rules say you have to collect this anyway. And so those were the crux of the. Feedbacks and concerns, but many of my colleagues, I will tell you. Uh, we're very appreciative, uh, many and folks, particularly in my district are very appreciative to kind of learn this because now now it's a major public accountability tool. Now, people get to ask ask their, whether it's their mayor, city council members, school community to say, hey. What are we doing to make sure the opportunity is reaching all of our kids and zip codes regardless of where you live? So it's a great tool today to organize to push more resources equitably across our schools.

Thank you. And just because I'm also on a time, I have two more questions that I want to try to get in. And so one is, and this is just curious curiosity here. I'm just wondering whether or not the schools who are doing better at fundraising, was there any discussion around how we build equity? Maybe perhaps they give a percentage of, what they raise back into some sort of funds so that they can help support the schools that were not doing great. Was there any kind of like solutions aside from just knowing what we know and your successful budget advocacy work? But I'm curious if there was any type of discussions around that.

Yeah, I mean, again, It did generate some conversations. The current regulations in the public school system in New York don't kind of allow for some sort of that type of redistribution of some kind. However, I will say that there were school districts in Brooklyn, in the communities around Park Slough, Prospect Park community, the other half of the borough, that, for example, have an annual Prospect Park walk Where they raise money for the entire school district, and they try to provide those resources to the, to all the community. So it did generate or validate some efforts to kind of. Do things to kind of make sure that every school was getting kind of a piece of that pie. The biggest thing council member was to force the to do more as well.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I'm so sorry that we don't have a lot of time. but I'm going to use the privilege of being the chair just to go a little bit over. I'm also curious around the organizing, right? I mean, these are the sort of opportunities that really inspire parents to organize around this inequity. Did you see any type of organizing happening once the parents knew what they knew? Was there any groundswell of support? And then my second follow-up question is I'm also curious as to whether or not the district decided that they played a role in helping to build the capacity of the parent councils that weren't as successful and what role, if any, did the DOE play in helping to build capacity for other parent councils?

Great questions, I'll try to be as succinct as possible on number 1, parents played a tremendous role. If anything, I would not have been able to do what we did in the council in my final years. If not for parents and families, the revealing and sobering data out of the fundraising bill. And the fact that we already knew that most of our schools were not getting what they're owed by the city's own funding formula known as fair student funding. uh as i mentioned earlier we were able to add hundreds of millions of dollars in my final budget to schools directly to get every school at 100 of their fair student funding formula largely because of parents and family advocacy again it's not mission accomplished because we still need to do more to directly provide direct aid and support to pas and ptas and the second part is uh yes uh now I could tell you that, forgive me, Councilor Ernst, I want to make sure I got the second question right. If you could just repeat that.

Yeah, it was really more around the role that the DOE plays, if any, in helping to support to build the capacity of other parent councils so that they can fundraise as well.

Yeah, so to excellent question into this was also raised, I think, by city councilman counselor Culpepper with regard it forced the to staff up their face division, family and community engagement division to actually provide more support to we know where to target that support. And we learned again, just to be clear. Just because a school was reporting zero doesn't mean families don't care. It was because there was no infrastructure invested in by the central district to support that school community. So now there's a lot more folks working in FACE, but again, not mission accomplished by any means.

Okay. And then I have two more questions. One is for Travis, and then I'll go back to you for my last question. But for Travis, according to the IRS contributions in FY 2025, Boston Arts Academy had over $5 million. in donations, while Fenway High School, which is just 10 minutes away, received under a million, which is still a lot, like a million, you know, it's not bad. But how common are these discrepancies such as this? And what do you know, and the rest of Quest would believe is the best solution to addressing those discrepancies? And then for you, Mark, my last question is I'm going to ask you whether or not you think this is something that would work here in the city of Boston, considering that we're not a district as large as New York. And if so, what would that look like? And then that's it for me.

Thank you, Counselor. What I can say is that the disparities are actually wider than the ones that you just used as an example, both at the elementary level and at the high school level. You know, some schools had $11 in their accounts and some schools had millions upon millions of dollars in their accounts. And when we went back and tried to retrace the data for an update in 2023, the biggest thing we noticed is that post pandemic and post ESSER funding that a lot of the smaller 501c3 organizations had fallen off and were no longer reporting. They were, we assumed that they are defunct if they're not filing with the IRS. But the largest funding schools actually increased their fundraising capacity dramatically over in the years following COVID. And so I guess what I would like to leave you with, if I may, is just to say that with school budgets tightening, it's perfectly understandable that people want to find other funding sources for their child's school. But we should be really careful not to conflate the structural ability to raise money with access to wealth. Our analysis of the 2018 data showed that schools with higher poverty levels, schools serving a high percentage of students categorized as African American and Hispanic, did not have the same levels of community wealth that support the district's most successful fundraising schools. And each city council district has one or two of these schools with large fundraising operations. but it also has many schools that do not. And the school choice system that we currently have for assignment tends to reinforce that disparity already, whether that information is on a dashboard or not. Thank you.

Thank you for that. Okay, Councillor Traeger, and this is it for you, okay?

Yeah, you got it. I would say... the city of boston to to the council counselors everyone just a friendly reminder these are public schools and u.s policy makers uh families folks have every right to know how we're resourcing our schools and how our schools are being resourced and uh both in terms of The public dollars that go in and the supplemental resources, because we have to, in order to make the best informed decisions, you need to have the most information in front of you. How do you negotiate a budget? If you don't have the full picture of what our schools are receiving or not receiving. And so I think in order to make the most informed best decision on behalf of kids and families and educators, we should know about about these resources that are coming in. They do make a difference. It's not in the differences that. You know, the supplemental things that we talked about, but also it drove a larger conversation in the city about our budget process as well, in terms of how we fundamentally resource schools. So, I think this is going to be an eye opening and very healthy. It's transparency at its best, but it's going to ultimately result in my hope in more resources, particularly where those kids and school communities need the most. Thank you for opportunity.

Thank you, Councilor Traeger. We really do appreciate your expertise and we look forward to sharing your legislation with my colleagues. And Councilor Culpepper, don't be trying to take it because I'm gonna be leading it, don't even. And we will hopefully be replicating it here as well. And you could be my co-sponsor, Councilor Culpepper, because you like to take all my work. All right, so we're gonna move on to the next panel. Travis, you're more than welcome to stay. I know, Councilor Treger, you had another commitment, so you are free to go. We really do appreciate it. We'll be following up with you as we continue on this journey, right? So I'm gonna go over now to the advocates panel. We have James Newman, Oh my Lord. Nguyen, or you will pronounce it correctly when it's your turn. BPS parent and associate professor of education. And we have Keo McClay, executive director of BEJA. So we'll start with James and you will educate us on how to correctly say your last name. James, you now have the floor.

Thank you Madam chair. Um, I really appreciate this opportunity to testify today. My name is James noonan. Uh, I, as you said, I'm an associate professor of education at the school of education at Salem state University. I'm also a resident of Roxbury and a parent of 2 students in the Boston public schools. 1 at the Nathan Hale elementary school, and the other at English high school. And I want to start a little bit about this idea of money and education. And when it comes to money and education, the research is really clear. And Councillor Traeger spoke to this briefly. An increase in per pupil spending is positively associated with numerous educational benefits. A recent study found that an additional $1,000 per student per year sustained over four years increased both student test scores and college enrollment. Moreover, the positive outcomes were larger for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, which means that money that is targeted at the most in need can yield the greatest benefit. School budgets, as we know, are largely made up of allocations from the city and the state. In Boston, the new reimagined school funding formula lays out two spending categories. Compliance funding, which funds staffing that is required to serve the students in that school, and discretionary funding, which funds external partnerships and or staffing beyond what is required. However, as we also know, and as we've discussed, some schools supplement these allocations with another pot of money, and this private fundraising can include school-based fundraisers and established 501c3 nonprofit organizations. The amount of money that's raised and held by these organizations varies tremendously. According to ProPublica, which kind of gathers the most recent tax filings available, which has also been referenced, the Friends of the Nathan Hale School, where my children have attended, had just over $9,000 in assets in 2022. which is the most recent filing available. In 2025, the Boston Latin School Association reported net assets of over $97 million. And meanwhile, there are dozens of BPS schools that have no fundraising arms at all or defunct fundraising arms, as Travis Marshall mentioned. This disparity across schools is not random. Researchers who have studied private fundraising in the city of Philadelphia found that schools that had 501 tended to serve students in neighborhoods that were on average more white and more economically advantaged. And I suspect that the same is true not in Philadelphia. Privately raised money is used to pay for enrichment activities, field trips, athletics, school supplies, technology, and more. At the Nathan Hale School, the Friends of the Nathan Hale helped to fund rehab school playground, which was badly needed. And so that fundraising was a critically important part of rehabbing that playground and providing a safe and engaging place to play for all the students. But it might also be used to blunt the negative impact of proposed budget cuts, which happen on occasionally. The most recent $1.7Billion school budget passed by this body was estimated to require hundreds of job cuts across the district. I'm sure that was a very difficult vote for you. for this council. And so in times of scarcity, schools that do not have the benefit of private revenue streams are likely to suffer even more. Importantly, privately raised dollars are not reflected on district spreadsheets, meaning that we have an incomplete picture of the financial resources for better and worse available to various schools. Budget processes are often opaque. I have certainly observed this attending school site council meetings and budgeting meetings. The language of budget allocations and student funding is hard to interpret. Questions from families, including myself, tend to focus on basic clarifying questions and not on deeper issues of what matters, what's important, and what we most value. But this information deficit about private fundraising on a policy level deepens inequality, I think. The truth is that without a systematic accounting of private fundraising, a transparent systematic accounting, we cannot know year to year how big the resource gap is between schools that have private fundraising streams and schools that don't. This is, I think, a gaping public policy black hole, which makes it very hard, if not impossible, for you and for the broader public to know the true impact of any budgeting decisions. As policy makers and as stakeholders with a commitment to equity and accountability, we have an obligation to care the most for the least among us. But without transparency on private fundraising, we are constrained in our ability to do just that. So in closing, I'd urge you all to consider measures that compel schools and the district to make private fundraising revenues public and transparent and easily accessible to all. And I really thank you again for the opportunity to testify and for holding this hearing. I think this is a really, really critical issue.

Thank you, James. And I really do appreciate you uplifting the BPS budget and all the walls that we go through. So thank you for that. And I'll have lots of questions when it's my turn. But for now, we're going to move on to Keel. You now have the floor. And thank you for being here.

Good afternoon everyone, thank you for having me. Um, I'm a submit. I'm a little under the weather right now, but I'm the executive director of the Boston education justice alliance. I'm an alumnus of editor and Kennedy Academy for health careers. Former student rep on the Boston school committee and former president the Boston student advisory council celebrating my 12th year in advocacy this year. So. um and i want to start by being clear that private fundraising in our public schools is not simply a fundraising issue is an issue it's an equity issue an opportunity gap issue and ultimately a question of public policy bps has made a commitment to eliminate opportunity gaps and ensuring equitable access to high quality learning opportunities but we have to look honestly at whether our current systems are actually delivering on those promises which they have not When 1 school community can leverage significant wealth, social capital, social capital, financial networks, private donors, while another cannot recreate 2, very different educational experiences within the same school district. This is a structural inequity, and we cannot separate that from race class geography, or historically under invested black and brown communities. I don't wanna blame, we can't blame parents, we can't blame educators, we can't blame school communities for fundraising. They're doing what they can to make sure that students have access to opportunities, but the question we should be asking is why does a child's access to opportunity depend on their school's ability to fundraise? If we are serious about an equity lens, then we have to examine the totality of resources available to all students. Not just the dollars that appear in school allocation. Bps already has tools such as the opportunity index and equity impact analysis designed to identify disparities and direct resources towards students and schools with greater needs. So, I'm demanding that the school committee, and the woo skipper administration apply the same level of rigor to private fundraising. How much is each school raising who has access to those who has access to those resources where opportunities are being created because of those fundraising and where opportunities are students at other schools missing because their communities don't have the same social or economic capital. We need transparency, we need accountability and we need a district wide strategy for ensuring that private fund rating does not undermine equitable resources. Um, or equitable allocation, I should say, because public education cannot operate on a model where the schools with this most social capital get the most opportunity. If we are serious about closing opportunity gaps, then we cannot simply measure what BPS provides. We have to measure what students. Actively have access to every student deserves excellent education, regardless of the zip code, their school's fundraising capacity and their family's connections. Opportunity should be a public commitment and not a private privilege. Thank you.

Okay, good job. Thank you. It almost feels and I'm going to move into my colleagues questions, but I just want to insert this really quick is that, you know, these are public schools, but it feels like some of them are semi-private in many ways, right? Because the supplemental capacity for fundraising and based on James's data in terms of who is attending these schools are predominantly more fluent and more white. And obviously that's how they keep schools segregated, not just racially, but also socioeconomically. And so that's why I'm so glad that, you know, it's people like James and Travis and Quest that are, leading this charge because you're not just thinking about your own kids. And oftentimes that is a narrative, like everyone's just thinking of their own. And the fact that you are sharing this responsibility and, you know, bring the lens to the inequities that exist in schools that are under-resourced and also under-organized, like, I'm really excited to dig in a little bit deeper to this. So thank you all for this. I'm gonna go. The order of arrival has shifted because I believe that Councilor Flynn is no longer with us, nor is Councilor Fitzgerald. So we'll go to Councilor Louis-Jean, then Councilor Weber, and then Councilor Culpepper, and then myself. So Councilor Louis-Jean, you now have the floor.

Thank you, Councilor Mejia, and thank you to James and to Keough for your testimony. I agree the economic and social capital in the school can really be transformative and introduce students to opportunities that they wouldn't otherwise have. And so I want to thank you all for your testimony, especially in a week where we know there's been a lot of conversation around education justice and what it looks like to really think about community needs and not just individual advancement of a student. So I just want to thank you for your testimony and I look forward. I have more questions for the administration, so I'm going to withhold my questions to that panel. Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, and congrats to Keough on all the wonderful, I think you stated that you were just pointing towards, I just wanted to say congratulations and hope you feel better soon.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Thank you, Councilor Lewisham. We'll go now to Councilor Weber, and you now have five minutes on the floor.

Okay, thank you. Yeah, I feel better, Keough, and congratulations on 12 years of advocacy. So I guess just in terms of the issue we heard about New York City, you know, I guess, do we have this, Do we think we have the same issue here in Boston? Do you have any examples of, do we think schools are hiding resources to get more funding, which is, I think, seemed to be what the issue in New York was, one of the potential issues. I don't know. I'll start with you, Professor Noonan, if you have any thoughts.

Thank you for that question, Councillor Weber. I can't speculate on whether schools are trying to shelter or hide resources in order to boost their funding. But I think the issue for me is that we see that there is a disparity in these kind of mechanisms and the support and the infrastructure to support a supplemental private fundraising revenue stream. And as the as the counselor from New York City said in his testimony earlier, This is fundraising for your school or fundraising for your child's school is not the issue. We care about our children's education. We care about the schools our children's attend. The issue is the disparity and the lack of transparency and information, which helps that disparity grow. Because if we don't have the information about where these supplemental revenues are, I mean, we can kind of do the individual kind of excavation work of going and digging through ProPublica's database of tax filings, but it's still a black box. We don't know. And so having kind of clear information helps us know where schools require extra support, schools that are better positioned to withstand times of scarcity. That to me is the issue. Of course, if there are schools that are sheltering resources to gain that system, that's obviously an issue too. I think it's a related issue. To me, it's a separate issue.

Do you know how much the Hale raises each year? I've had kids at the Mendel, Mission Hill School, Curly, but I don't know what kinds of dollar figures.

I'm not involved directly in the Friends of the Nathan Hale group, so I don't know. What I do know is that in Like, a few years ago, they had $9,000 on hand. I think some of that money probably went to the new playground. So I don't know how much money they have on hand now. I don't know how much they raise, but I will say that my wife and I do contribute to that. It is like a way to support the school, but it also means that, you know. that is a school that has this infrastructure in place to receive donations where other schools don't. Like the other schools that are also close by, the Higginson Lewis is right across the park from me and they don't have a Friends of the Higginson Lewis. There's like not the resources and the infrastructure in place. And so one possibility might be that you know, there there might be ways to provide additional support beyond what, you know, BDF provides as a fiscal agent, beyond like there may be other ways to support the capacity building for fundraising and schools to to to take advantage of the resources and community wealth that Boston has to offer.

Yeah. Just the last question, sharing this for you again, Professor Newton, since the head on my screen here. Are there other cities that you think we should look toward as models for this? Have you come across other places that do this well?

That's a really good question. I don't feel like I'm well informed enough on the kind of full range, but I think the example that Councillor Traeger from New York City brought today is actually a very, very good and simple model that could help. meaningful consequences for us in Boston.

Okay, thank you very much. Thank you to everyone else. Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you, Councilor Weber.

And with your time, I'm curious if Travis, I know Quest has been doing a lot of work and research in that space. So would you happen to know, aside from New York City, are there any other cities that you would point to?

We met with folks in Portland. We met with folks in Charlotte Mecklenburg. Honestly, 12 or 14 different cities and towns. Every town has, every place has their own particular way of addressing this or at least publishing it. But New York City's was the most comprehensive in terms of the requirement every year of publishing that information without any additional remedies prescribed. just the data out front and public without any particular agenda accompanying it, which is, I think, what we thought would be an appropriate first step.

Thank you for that, Travis. And I inserted you back into the conversation. So thank you for being so willing to answer. Thank you. I know Councilor Culpepper has been patiently waiting. So Councilor Culpepper, you have five minutes and the floor.

Thank you, Madam Chair, but I'm going to wait. until the administration comes on. That's where most of my questions will probably be answered. So do I get to add my five minutes now to the administration?

Do I get another five minutes?

No, I'm good. I want to, yeah, because...

It's not equitable distribution here, okay? You can't transfer wealth like that. No, it's not happening.

Well, I'll hold my will until the administration comes. That's right. That sounds like a good plan for you.

All right, so I'll have my questions and then we'll transition into our... our third panel. So I'm curious, certain schools such as BLS have entire positions funded by their school associations. That's right, you heard it here. How do we ensure we fund programs and positions that are important to student success equitably across the entire district?

Hmm. I wonder if Keoh has thoughts on that.

Sorry, I was blowing my nose. Can you repeat the question?

Oh, yes. So the question is that there are certain schools such as BLS that they have entire positions funded by their school associations, right? And so how do, under those circumstances, how do we ensure that we fund programs and positions that are important to student success equitably across the entire district?

Across the entire district, I mean, that's a question that I think that we're all have in mind right now with budget season starting and thinking about the 500, 400 plus pair of positions that we lost this year alone in the last budget season. So, thinking about how are we not cutting vital staff in the school communities? Or, you know, maybe okay, I'm going to stop myself before I ramble because I can go into rent, but I'm not. So, I think. Utilizing tools that the district already has, like the opportunity index and the equity impact analysis, being able to refresh that, maybe working with the opportunity we got task force to think about how effective is this tool? How can we expand it to be more inclusive of, um, donorship at individual schools? And. Yes, that's all I can think of at the moment.

I appreciate that. It just goes, the question was really hoping to get at the fact that the reason why so many schools are successful is because they have the infrastructure to really be able to do just that. And whereas parent council, you know, it's volunteer. And a lot of the parents, particularly in schools with low income and under-resourced families, neighborhoods, they just don't have the time or capacity to do just that. And I think that there is a role for the district to play. And I think my hope is aside from the reporting that we can get at what else we can be doing to help support, you know, the overall ecosystem. So thank you for that.

I mean, also also school has an extensive alumni network that gives back to their community. They've also have private development teams that work with. Institutions in the Fenway area to create, like. Exclusive opportunities for students in their schools that we don't see being offered to schools, like. The Holland school formerly known as the Burke, or even who still doesn't have a building after 25 years of being an industry charter. So, I mean, we see these disparities generation after generation, no matter what we're going through. So, yeah.

Thank you names.

I was just going to add that. I think I kind of building on that. The, if the 1st step is getting information, uh, clear across the across schools and across district that we have a full picture of what the resources are and what the resource disparities are, you know, that kind of information could, like, another step after that could be to fold that information into things like budgeting tools. Um, and school choice tools, like the opportunity index or other kind of budgeting. Kind of formulas, so that we can ensure greater equity across those schools in terms of staffing resources in terms of material resources in terms of curriculum resources. I'd certainly be happy to be a part of a conversation like that. And I think we can't. Do that until we have all the information and in a way that's like easily accessible, digestible, interpretable. Um, and so to to to get that 1st, then we can can use it in the service of the, um. Of what you're what you're talking about counselor.

Thank you for that, James. And then I'm just, this will be my last question is what are some of the inequities that you see now across the district? And this is just to get it on the record because we know what we know, but just for the sake of this exercise on the ground, what do you see those inequities looking like? And, you know, James, specifically for you as a parent, how do you see this impacting your children's educational outcomes? And I'm particularly interested in English high school, I was like, oh, wow, you actually picked that school. And, you know, I know that school and I'm happy to see that parents are recognizing the gem that it is. And I'm curious kind of like what those inequities look like specifically at English.

It's a really good question. Our oldest just started at English three weeks ago. And so having a full sense of both the opportunities, the resources, and what you said, the gem, I really agree with you. And I know that, and I think Travis could speak to this too, Travis also has a child at English, is that English does have an alumni association. It does have fundraising capacity, but I think that at the last kind of tax filing, it had like $800,000 on hand. which, again, is one is less than one tenth of what the Boston Latin School Association has. And there's to my knowledge, I don't know what kind of development capacity development officers fundraising is in place. But, you know, for example, English has one modern foreign language. They offer Spanish as an elective. compared to, I think, six or seven languages at Boston Latin Academy. And so that's just one example of the, and the intramural clubs, extracurricular activities, field trips. These are other things that are really differently distributed across the district. And, you know, that's that as that's we have to take that into account. But when we're making choices for schools, but also when we're making choices about how we allocate resources to schools and across schools. So.

Thank you. I was just. My time is up too. And I'll just say before we transition over to the admin panel, is that, yeah, go ahead, Keel.

I was just going to add something else as base of the coalition too, which is like some of the other inequities we have all around like our core campaigns, which are like facilities around new bills and renovations happening in the district where schools that are primarily serving black and brown students don't have access to having the same resources for repairs as students, as schools like BLS or OB Or, um, Latin Academy, um, also other disparities are around expanding the multilingual learners alliance and the work for bilingual literacy across the district as well. Um, especially for, like, Haitian Creole or Cape Verdean Creole and expanding those versus just some of the other ones that we have emphasized as well. Um, as well as the exam school policy, where we're interveners in the case right now, working with the legal defense fund. holding Boston Public School Committee accountable for adopting this new policy that has proven will have a drop in admissions for black and brown students in the upcoming years. So those are just other inequities that are happening that aren't just siloed to, you know, fundraising.

Thank you for that, Gil. You know, as I think about this conversation, I always like to frame it as the whole child, right? And sometimes we focus so much on just the academics and the quality of experience for the textbooks and things of that nature. But I believe that the soft skills, the cultural experiences, those things really help shape the trajectory of a student. And I think that these are the sort of things that other schools have the advantage of because they have the luxury of being able to supplement these extra activities for students. And I think that creates a further divide for students. So I wanna name that as one of the things that I think is really important for us to keep top of mind as we continue having this conversation. And just for the record, as of 2024, from what I understand, English High had $771,000. So close to 800. So you're good with numbers because, you know, you're not that bad off. So good job, James and Travis. I am going to move on to for the admin panel. And this is the moment that we all have been waiting for because I'm hoping that the administration is walking in, listening to what they've heard and being able to either clarify or, you know, hopefully you were inspired by what you heard today and are able to make some commitments to how we're going to fix all of this. But we're going to go on to the admin panel. We have our chief of finance at BPS, David Bloom. Dr. Anne Clark, the Development Officer for Strategy and Partnerships and Innovation at BPS, and our very own and very favorite amazing community organizer and activist and all things that deal with education equity, Pam Lanes from the Boston Education Development Fund. So I wanted to just give you all your five minutes each. And so who wants to start first?

Thank you so much, counselor. I'll kick us off before my illustrious colleagues take over. Thank you so much to everyone involved for raising this issue today and making sure we're spending time talking about a very important part of the distribution of funds in this city and something we should continue to be having a conversation about as we talk about funding education. I think I really want to mostly leave time to be able to answer questions from the council, but I will just say, you know, we take this work very seriously and have over a number of years. I'm hoping over the course of our conversation to be able to highlight things that we have been doing, such as our work on the partnerships fund. Originally with Dr conrose and using the opportunity index. As well, as our recent work with student activity accounts and publishing that, which I believe is what we could do that sort of equivalent to what they did in New York. And then our work really, especially over the last 2 years, as. Pam was mentioning in her earlier remarks in partnership with and equity to be able to really think about how we can be using our official 501 C3 partnership. with pam and her and bdf to be able to uh lift up those communities that might need our support um to get fundraising um so pam maybe i turn it over to you next to do your side and ann can close for us

And I wanna know for the record that Pam, it does not work for BPS, even though she was part of the admin panel. I wanna do that disclosure so that people don't associate her with the administration. There's nothing wrong with the administration, but just for the record, she's outside the system. Thank you very much.

Buenas tardes, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me. My name is Pam or Pamela Lanes. And for the past five years, I've had the privilege of serving as the executive director of the Boston Education Fund. Others may know us as the Boston Educational Development Foundation. Either one is fine. We all go by PEDF. I'm also a proud graduate of Boston Public Schools, the mother of two sons in Boston Public Schools, a fourth grader at the Hernandez and a ninth grader at new mission. I'm also a member of the citywide parent council leadership team. I'm a whole bunch of other things too, but I know I only have a few minutes. Those perspectives give me a front row seat to the inequities our children, schools, families, and educators face every day. I see the care and creativity in our school. I also see how hard people work to secure opportunities every child deserves. Thank you for holding the space in this hearing. Questions about who has access to private resources, how those resources are managed, and what they mean for students deserve an honest conversation. BEDF has supported BPS since 1984. We've been along for a long time. We are the nonprofit arm that BPS schools can turn to for fiscal sponsorship and fundraising support. And every BPS school is welcome to use our services. I want to stress that every single BPS school has the ability to use our services as their fiscal sponsor and fundraising partner. We help schools, departments, and education initiatives receive charitable gifts, manage funds, pay for approved activities, and report on those resources. A school leader or educator should not have to build a nonprofit or become a finance expert to bring opportunities to students. That's what we're here for. Over the past five years, we've asked ourselves a very hard question. if all the edf does is provide fiscal sponsorship who is best positioned to use that service were we inadvertently sustaining the very inequities we wanted to to close i've experienced what it means to belong to a school community with strong access to resources i've also seen a school across the street serving students with very similar demographics have a very different experience That difference can come down to relationships, fundraising capacity, and who has the time to make the act. Every school may be welcome to use BEDF, but an open door alone does not ensure every school has the same opportunity to walk through it. We had to look inward before we could do more outward. And so BEDF has invested in the systems that help us serve schools, and our team has grown from three people to six. In school year 2026, we've supported over 224 fund managers, provided hundreds of trainings, and processed more than 5,000 transactions. And we continue to examine how we operate and how we can do more than administer the resources that come our way. We've also worked hard to strengthen relationships across BPS and the broader educational ecosystem. We speak regularly with district leadership, departments, educators, families, community organizations, partners and funders. Our role as a connector is fundamental to our service. Understanding what a school community hopes to accomplish helps us bring people, partnerships and resources together. Funds managed through BEDF have supported 3D printers and smart boards in classrooms, experiential field trips, HBCU tours, student wellness, athletics, SAT prep, arts enrichment, and those are just a few examples. We also help schools make giving more accessible. Last year alone, we created 62 new online giving accounts, allowing for a school to invite support through something as simple as a QR code. My mother taught me that education is the one thing no one can take away from you. BPS helped me imagine a future beyond what my family had experienced. I want that for my sons and for every child whose family I hear from as a parent leader. Their opportunity should not depend on which school they attend or how much money the adults around them can raise. That belief led us to launch Edquity Boston, my baby. We're working to bring more resources to BPS schools while giving school communities a meaningful role in deciding what support they need. We're still learning, but our principle is clear. People closest to students' experience should have power in shaping investments intended to serve them. That includes our students, especially our students. They are at the center always. Transparency is part of our responsibility. BEDF is committed to clear reporting on the resources we manage and to working with BPS to better understand private resources across the district. That work calls for information families can understand and trust handled with appropriate care for schools and donors. Private philanthropy can open doors for students, but it cannot replace public funding. BEDF's job is to manage resources responsibly, make fundraising easier, connect people across the educational ecosystem, and keep asking, are we helping Opportunity reach the students who need it or only the school's best positions to ask for it? Thank you.

Nice. Okay. Thank you. So we'll go next to Dr. Clark. You now have the floor.

Good afternoon, everyone. I want to first echo David and Pam's thank you for bringing this very important issue to the fore. We all work every day and do what we do because we deserve our, we believe our students deserve all of these resources. And so we really appreciate your partnership. In this conversation, my role in the district is, as you said, as development officer for strategy partnerships and innovation. I also want to be mostly responsive to your questions, but I wanted to highlight 2 strategies that we employ district wide that David and I thought might be useful and relevant to this conversation. The 1st is the partnerships fund. which is something that is distributed through the central office. And in fiscal year 2019, a significant shift was made in that partnerships fund where it is allocated through an analysis using the opportunity index purposely to increase equity and close opportunity gaps. So, Using the opportunity index, the district identifies a percentage of schools who need additional resources. and distributes annually this year, it's $7 million additional funding to 105 schools because of their opportunity index scores. And this is an explicit strategy meant to mitigate some of the dynamics that we talked about earlier in the panel today. Uh, the other strategy that I wanted to highlight, um, were some of our district wide partnership and resource, um, initiatives, such as, uh, principal partners, formerly known as principal for a day. which is an annual initiative that we organize centrally connecting school leaders through a survey that solicits their input as to what kinds of partners and resources they're looking for and connecting them to businesses and companies that are connected to the Boston Chamber of And that happens annually, and some of those partnerships and resulting donations continue for several years. That said, we know there is much work to do, and we're excited to be part of this conversation today and hope to make some joint decisions about pathways forward. Thank you.

All right, so I am going to initiate the round of questions. As I mentioned, since we had three panels, we were going to do one round. So make it count, y'all. We'll go to Councilor Louis-Jean, followed by Councilor Weber, Councilor Culpepper, and then myself. And you each have five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to this panel. I also want to correct, I said Keogh, congrats on the board. Congrats on 12 years of advocacy. Really wanted to just make sure that I correct the record there. Pam, good to see you. Thank you for being on this panel. You stated, which I think was really important, that how are we making sure that you're serving schools that don't know basically, you know, that, for example, like I've donated to schools and events where it's like just a teacher trying to put something together, right? And they didn't do like go through the fiscal sponsorship. What is that solution? Like, how are you making sure that that school communities or teachers or, or parents like know to ask for your help? Like what? Because that's the hardest work. It's like the work of meeting people where they are, instead of waiting for them to knock on your door.

absolutely so we actually um we serve the majority of bps schools and i will even say there are schools that have their own friends of um accounts that also use us as their fiscal uh sponsor so um the idea that i confidently say that all of bps schools and departments know that we are here and that we're ready to serve them. And like I said, we've done a lot of inward work where over the past five years, we've really done some intentional work of making sure that schools at the school level, departments at the department level, parent councils at the parent council level, communities at the community level know what it is we're here to do to help to serve and like what are the resources that we have the ability to bring to them. So again, like our big thing, and you know me, a lot of people know me, like being a connector is such a huge part of the work that we do. And so I can confidently say all of the schools know we exist. How they use us is kind of like what we're working to meet them where they at so that they can better use us as a better resource.

Yeah, and that sounds like an incredible endeavor for a staff of six.

We're trying.

Yeah. Thank you, Pamela, for all the work that you do and that you've been doing for all of our schools and all of our kids. So appreciate it. And I'm glad that you were able to connect with Travis and really talk about the really great work that you're doing. Questions for administration is really if you could talk a little bit more about the Opportunity Index informs funding and what makes it up.

Yeah, um, so the opportunity index, um. Is designed to be a measure. Of, um, the community, this school serves, so it's not, um, about where the school is located and at elementary schools. It looks at measures like community poverty, community, educational attainment and others at the high school level. It also adds in information about students who are entering the school and needs they might have. And the goal of our use of the opportunity index and our funding formula is to ensure that. Those schools that have the least sort of. Community ability to fundraise. have some dedicated streams of funding funding for flexible use and it's split into two categories the first is the partnership fund which is specifically designed to fund the sorts of community enrichment activities that community fundraising often pays for and then the second is what's just called the school support fund it's a little bit more general and meant to be sort of more at the school's discretion to determine I think so that's sort of the main way we're using the opportunity index and can talk a little bit more about the way we partner with schools to determine sort of how they use that funding.

Thank you. But before we move to that, so is it inherent in the opportunity index as it currently exists? Are there schools that are currently getting more per pupil than other schools because of the opportunity index or because of the cost per student to educate? Is that currently or because of the socioeconomic background? Is that already happening?

Yes. So the opportunity index is weighted. So higher needs schools receive more funding. And we also provide additional funding to schools based on the level of poverty in the school, the number of homeless youth in the school. All of those measures increase the per pupil spending as schools with higher needs.

Right. And I think there is an additional and related question. about just what the social capital in the school will do for it that you can't necessarily make up for in dollars and cents. That's just about the network. And so what are the ideas there? Is that what Anne was going to talk about? Because I think when you talk about social and economic capital the parents among the alumni or the lack thereof that can really inform a school environment, even when the opportunity index is already taking into account higher spending for people in our low-income schools, which is the majority of Baltimore schools.

Totally. And I think the principal partner is a great example of that. I participated in that last year too.

This is the last question because the time has been up. So if you can answer that, that would be great. Thank you.

Yes, so our intention, just like the partnerships fund is to make sure that those schools that. Have fewer partners have fewer partners with capacity, have opportunities to connect with those kinds of partners through the principal partners. So we are explicitly making one-by-one matches, looking at the opportunity index, looking at school leaders' representation of what they need, and trying to connect those schools that need the most with the partners that have the most capacity. Thank you. And thank you for answering my questions.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Councilor Nguyen. Councilor Weber, you have five minutes, and then we're going to Councilor Culpepper.

Yeah, thank you very much for the panel. So, I guess, you know, we heard about in New York City. That there are certain areas where there, you know, there's a lot more resources poured into the schools. So, I think at the, at the elementary school level. I mean, I feel like I've been in every school in district 6 and some others across the city. Like, I. I'm not sure. I mean, I guess you have a district wide view. Is there a disparity in terms of, you know, what resources, you know, the schools have? And is that exacerbated by private fundraising? What's the...

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the short answer is, yes, you know, Councilor Mejia and I have talked about this a number of times over the years. We're having this hearing for a reason for sure. That disparity does exist. There are schools that have significantly more private fundraising power than others. I think we definitely take some efforts. to try and counter that with district funds, with city funds, with the funds you appropriate for us by things like the partnership fund that we were talking about earlier. But I also think both the principal partners and the work that Pam is doing at BDF to support schools, both in their connections to the broader Boston community and to private fundraising and philanthropy, are important and how we build a sort of network of philanthropy where there might be a central team, whether at BPS or at BDF, that's doing the hard work of building the relationships and the fundraising. But then we're ensuring that those resources are flowing down to our neediest schools. I don't know, Pam, if you want to talk a little bit about some of that pilot you're doing right now, which is really cool.

Yeah, so I think one of the big things that hasn't been mentioned is also a big person that should personify at the table is the funder, right? So if the funder decides that they want to give a million dollars to support 3D printers, I use this example a lot, right? And they say, we want to give every single third grade that has a kid with a blue eye and a green eye a 3D printer. Usually what happens is we kind of work backwards and go looking for that third grader that has a blue eye and a green eye, you know, so that they can get this 3D printer. Instead of actually having the conversation with the funder and saying, you know, thank you for the donation, we can actually put a 3D printer at every one of the schools. but to go a little further there are some schools that don't even have really good wi-fi right to be to to run the 3d printer or like the staff are going to need additional resources to even know how to teach the young people how to use the 3d printer so there's so much more than just that like very black and white there's money being donated into the school there's a lot of conversations that aren't being had and that's something that we have been bringing to the table as far as um equity that that's exactly what equity is in that we are having the conversations and we're the school community to let us know what their needs are so that we can kind of meet them where they are and we can help provide the foundation, let them know what they need to do and have them set up as to what it means to fundraise. We can take care of all of the finance and operations of it where, you know, there are We take away the burden of tax filings. All of that technical piece, it says exactly what the EDF is here to support with. And through equity, we as an organization are now fundraising to help district-wide in closing the gaps. And looking at all of the different schools, every school has needs. I say this all the time, but every need of the schools look very different. So it's our job to figure out where those gaps are so then we can work towards closing those gaps.

Just one last question. So in terms of like music education, is there, is this like disparity impact like where you could have a music teacher? Because I feel like I, we raised my admission in Hill School and I thought it went to like a part-time music teacher. Like I'm just trying to figure out the other, you know, some school might not have Wi-Fi or something like that. How does it actually play out? Like where are the resources that are missing.

Yeah, I mean, we found a lot of it initially. A lot of the resources were those sorts of extracurricular partners, things like music programs and arts and other things. You know, most of our schools, as long as you have a certain size and you can have, you know, you have enough need for multiple different types of specialties, we fund, you know, an art teacher, a music teacher, those sort of basics. But the more... complex or supplemental engagement programs might take more funding.

Okay. Thank you very much, Chief Blum, and thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilor Weber. Do you have, I mean, one more question? No, no, I'm good. I know Councilor Culpepper has been

patiently waiting and he, you know, and he's given me his time.

No, he's not. I'm the chair of this.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Weber. Okay, Council Culpepper.

Thank you, Chair. David, let me ask you a question because I'm trying to make sense of this. And so did I hear correctly that Boston Lighting has $97 million in their endowment?

That is what was said, and I certainly believe it. I would have to double check my records to be 100% sure.

And so you've got $97 million in one school's endowment. And I heard them talk about the Opportunity Index. But when I was at the Orchard Garden School last year, or earlier this year, I was really fighting to get those auditorium seats six because the students couldn't sit in the auditorium to do any studying because the seats had yellow tape all across them. When we talked to the capital budget person, Brian, Brian said it had to go on a capital budget schedule unless it was considered emergency. Now, I considered those seats that were in the auditorium. They couldn't use those seats up front. It's quite a few rows. They couldn't use them. I considered that an emergency. But yet you have $97 million in an endowment at Boston Latin that's not being used. How can we, how can that happen?

yeah it's a very tricky situation right because um that 97 million dollars is not our money right it's it's money that's been privately fundraised by by a 501c3 i think the work we try and do especially with our larger 501c3s like the two that have been mentioned today the friends of boston latin school and um the boston arts academy foundation is identify ways where those foundations and the money they raise can be used to support other students throughout the district so i know the boston latin school association does a lot of funding for our exam school initiative work um you know preparing um scholars and especially with a focus on students who might have historically been marginalized for access to the latin school i know the boston arts academy does a lot of work in the broader community with arts education at other schools as well And so I think what we're really trying to work on with those 501 organizations that are affiliated that aren't run by Pam is to make sure that we are ensuring that we are getting that broad community benefit as well as the support for the individual school that they're raising money for.

So does the council have to do something or do we have to look at the ordinance to amend it? Because I thought, and I guess I thought wrong that all the money that was raised by outside organizations had to come through the council in order for it to get to the school.

Yeah, so no, unfortunately. So the way it works is that the 501 organization can raise the money directly. They're their own separate entity. They raise the money directly. And then if they're choosing to spend it, that's when they have to work with the BPS and the school committee.

Right. But I thought all the money that came from grants outside of the school in order to come to the school to be used, that the council had to approve that grant money.

The school committee does in the case of the schools.

So the council has no role whatsoever with money that's being raised outside that then comes through the schools. And so when we're approving this grant money that's coming from outside sources to the school, like we just did for Madison Park a few weeks ago, I think we proved money for Madison Park for the different programs that it was being used for. We proved that. But there's outside money that's coming to the schools that We don't even know about.

That's right. I believe the outside funding that the council approved a few weeks ago actually went to the Office of Workforce Development, which is why it went to Madison Park. It went to support students at Madison, but it's going through the Mayor's Office of Workforce Development, which is why it comes through the council. Outside fundraising for the Boston Public Schools, grants that are received by the Boston Public Schools go to the Boston School Committee and not to the council.

Not to the council. And so we should probably start looking at some council amendments because I was under the impression that when we approved that grant money, it didn't go to the mayor's office, that grant money went to, in fact, I think the unions had some role in that money that went to Madison park, I think, but it seems like there's, there's some loopholes there where that $97 million can sit with a friend of Boston Latin while Orchard Gardens students can't even use their auditorium because the seats are torn up. And so I'm just amazed. I just wanted to come back to the opportunity index because if the opportunity index is going around assessing what needs the other schools have, they must have missed the Orchard Garden School because we were fighting and pushing for that money to get on the emergency list so that the seats could be either repaired or they could bring in new seats so the students could use the auditorium. And so for the opportunity index, how does that opportunity index and When they go to the schools, are they going to every school that has needs and those needs go on the list? How does that happen?

I just want to, you know, Chief Bloom, that this will, I already gave Councilor Culpepper extra time. So this would be his final question. So if you could answer that, that would be great.

Thank you. My answer will be in 27 parts.

But David, I wanted to, there was someone that was talking about the opportunity index.

Yeah.

So you just give us an overview of, yes, name it a brief blurb of how it works and what the goals and objectives are.

I'll be very quick about it. So the the partnership fund goes to about the highest need, about 40 percent of schools, about 40 schools get that partnership fund. Right. Then there's a broader set of. Uh, dollars called the school support fund that goes to a much broader set of about 100 schools. The partnership fund, the goal is to support works with external partners at the school. So, uh, orchard gardens gets 270,000 dollars. For that partnership fund. uh annually approximately that much to work with outside organizations to provide additional supports whether it's music or arts theater to the school

But David, how does the schools that like Orchard?

Oh, I'm sorry.

I just want this question was about the opportunity index. It wasn't about that fund. It was about the opportunity index that she said they went around to schools and they looked at the needs from the school and they put them on this list in order for the for the principal, the principal partners.

no i i was i was talking about the partnership fund but so the opportunity index is a tool that is used to to figure out which schools need partnership dollars so that's the connection okay and and how does it work though how does it work

Orchard Gardens is one of the highest need schools on that list, for sure.

And they got the lease. $250,000 is not equitable. If that's the highest needed, then that's the threshold. But that's a whole other conversation. I'm anxious to get my questions in, Councilor Culpepper. Okay, go on.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Thank you, council Culpepper for your advocacy on behalf of your district and all of our students. So I guess, you know, I want to just kind of, it's a hypothetical situation here, but I'm just very curious if we're utilizing the student weighted formula based on the highest needs, to fund our schools, what it would look like if we are using the most resourced fundraising, highest schools, to then fund them accordingly so that there is a more of a level playing field. And I don't understand, I don't know if you get what I'm trying to ask. So if BLS has millions and millions and millions of dollars already in their budget and Orchard Garden has not, Can you use the opportunity index tool in the reverse and maybe call it the affluent index tool to offset some of this work so they get less money from the district since they have the most money in their accounts?

yes um i i hear you on that i so boston latin school is currently the lowest funded school in the district per pupil um that is based on the needs of the students who go there however i think your point is also valid right which is they are offsetting that with private with private fundraising for sure My math is of the last year was something equivalent to about 3000 dollars per pupil. Because the other thing is, they are the basically the largest school in the district. Right? So. When we think about things for people, that's a pretty big difference. Right? And so I think what we're thinking about right while the opportunity index provides several 100 dollars per pupil. In addition, it is definitely less than. The fundraising power of the Boston Latin school association, so I think what we're trying to do is 2 things. 1 is through things like the reimagine school funding formula, identify ways we can direct resources to our highest need schools. 1st. and then partner with amazing organizations like Pam's to do fundraising for those schools that can't afford to do it for themselves.

Okay, great. And because, you know, I don't have a lot of time, I want to, you know, keep the conversation going. I'm going to move on to my next set of questions here. I appreciate the answer. Pam, and briefly, just high level, I'm just going to ask all my questions, so you all should write them down, because after I ask them, I'm just going to let you all answer them, so that way we can get through... public testimony. So for Pam, I'd like for you to talk a little bit about what can BDEF, you know, what you all are doing to create more streamlined ways for schools to fundraise because you're already doing amazing work. I'd love to see you all maybe doing the training, working more in partnership with maybe you can, the BPS can contract you all as a training institute to help support these schools. I mean, there has to be some solutions here aside from just the reporting. I think that we need to really start thinking about also both the strengthening, right? Once we know what we know, what schools do we need to support? We'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And even though BDEF supports a lot of schools with their fundraising, BPS should be providing a base budget that covers the school basic needs. Is the district working on any plan to fully fund schools with this $1.8 billion budget? I'm also curious how many BPS schools have 501 that you know of. Is this information publicly available? And if not, why? Why isn't that information available? Is private fundraising done by individual schools considered in the reimagined school fund formula? So thinking through this in terms of the infrastructure, when you're thinking about your equitable distribution, are you thinking about how much money these schools already have? Does the district work alongside the 501 and other private funders to supplement any budgetary and resource deficits? How is the racial equity planning tool used, if at all, when private donations are given to some schools and not others. So I'm just curious what insight you can provide on that. And how does the district and the central office support parent councils with technical assistance, building infrastructure similar to FACE in New York City? And lastly, David, and this is you, because you've been here the longest dealing with me, is that I've always have been asking for dashboards about everything. Like I want everything to be transparent. As we have this conversation, would like to know what the appetite is from BPS and what would it look like and what would you need to be able to deliver this reporting tool on our website? Those are all my questions. So you could take them in the order that I asked, or you can bounce around, whatever you see fit.

I think I got most of them written down. Pam, your first question was for you. Do you want to take it?

Yeah, so we're actually doing all of that. We're doing the trainings. At the lowest and easiest, I guess, tangible example, and I mentioned this in my statement, is that we're creating donation links for all of the schools. So at the very minimum, every school on their web page should have a donate link that they can then send out to their networks. And that's just kind of like a low hanging fruit on how they can start to activate their fundraising efforts. We have started working with the parent councils. We started working with the citywide parent council as its fiscal sponsor. and really providing all of the resources that they need. We have a resource development and communication manager, Samantha, who works directly with the schools, provides them with one-on-one training. She helps when she can provide actual visuals. There's literally this toolbox that we provide schools with how they can use all of the resources to maximize on their fundraising efforts. So that's all happening. And that's something we've been focused on outside of our whole finance and operations like world that we've lived in.

Right, and I guess to kind of like put a button on that specific, and I'm glad that you laid out everything as you did now, and let's go around, because I'm curious what role if any BPS plays in partnering with you all on those deliverables? Are they providing you with any type of resources support? You know, whether it's a grant, how are they supporting you support parents?

So we have, I mean, we have an MOU with BPS as a district to provide the service to all the schools. And as I mentioned earlier, every single school has the ability to use us as a service. We have a pay for service kind of model. So that's how I'm able to pay my staff. But that's, you know, that's very minimal. And then we do our own fundraising as an organization to support the staff, our own operational budget, as well as, you know, hopefully bring in new funding to also reinvest into BPS. So it's like a yes, we're working on it and we're like figuring out better ways to support each other. The other big thing is the communication. We have really done some intentional work on strengthening the communication between BPS and BEDF so that we know what funders we're talking to collectively. We know that these five schools have been asking this funder for $5,000. But it's like, OK, wait a second. Why don't we ask for you? and have like these more strategic conversations. I think that has been a really a key thing as to the work that we're doing collectively and in partnership with each other to better support our school.

I love that. Thank you. Thank you for that breakdown. And so, okay, so David and Dr. Clark, if you could take the rest. Yeah, and don't stay and don't, you know, you don't have to go too deep in the weeds because I want to be mindful of the taste.

Yeah, I think. In terms of, we should definitely have a follow up conversation about what we should make public and how we do it. I think. I certainly have no issues with making what we have available public. I think there are some. issues around timing and availability of reports from 501 C threes. But in terms of everything else, we certainly, we can always put the most recent available public so we can talk about what's what's the best way to do that to make it digestible and understandable.

Yeah, and I'd like to insert that I'd love to create some sort of advisory committee as you continue to think about what would be the type of public facing information that we would share. So Travis and your team, you know, just said this is an invitation that once they start thinking about that, we'd love to invite you all to be at the table. Okay, David, continue.

Yep, um, in terms of, uh, uh, the intersection with our reimagine school funding, I think. Um, because we can't control or directly predict private fundraising. What we tried to look at were what were ways we can ensure that higher need schools are getting more of that 2nd category of discretionary funding that was outlined earlier. Um, that was 1 of the big, um. things we needed to change in our funding formula. And Councilor, I know you're very familiar with this from your past work, but just for the more general public, historically with weighted student funding, the problem was is that the basics took up all of the money and then our higher needs schools then didn't often have the money for those sort of discretionary choices. And discretionary doesn't mean optional, it means just sort of at the discretion of the school for that programming. By guaranteeing equitably distributed discretionary funding, that's 1 of the ways that, um, our reimagine school funding formula is working on this issue. I'm not suggesting we've solved it by any means, but that was definitely the intention. Um. And then in terms of support for parent councils, I think I'm probably not the perfect person to answer this because I know does a lot of that support directly. But we partner with to do budget trainings. With school site council members is mostly newer school site council members. Those aren't always the highest attended events. So I think continuing to work with Pam and our office of family and community advancement to figure out how we can expand and support those parent councils. And then the last thing I would also want to shout out is. our hub schools work. I think that initiative is a great way when those schools are really focused at higher needs schools to build a hub for community resources in the school, both through our supportive fundraising and through connections to community organizations. And I'm sorry, counselor, if I missed one, please let me know.

My time is way over and But wait a minute. Hold on. Don't get too excited, David.

I'm just looking at my notes, making sure I didn't miss anything.

No, I think you did. The racial equity planning tool.

Oh, yes.

Can you talk to me a little bit about that one, please?

Yes. Sorry. That's the one I definitely missed that. Let me get back to that. So we use the racial equity planning tool in our design of our reimagined school funding formula. We cannot enforce a private 501 C3 to use it separately. So I think what we try and do is think about how can we use the information we know. As we're as we're having conversations about the funding that we have to distribute that funding more equitably. And for us, that does include use of the racial equity planning tool.

And then how does the district in the central office support parent councils with technical assistance? I know Pam talked a little, you know, a lot about her work. And I don't want Pam doing the district's job. So I'm just curious what role you all are playing to support that work as well.

So, um, my team primarily supports through student activity accounts, which are the things I think are most similar to what the Council from New York was describing, um, which are accounts that sort of take money that's raised from parents and. Big sales and, um, other sort of fundraising things. and redistribute those for student activities in the organization. So we do technical assistance directly to schools with working on those accounts. And then we partner with the parent engagement team in the Office of Family and Community Advancement to support trainings for school site councils. I don't believe we support parent councils separately from school site councils, but I think that would definitely be something we'd be open to supporting for sure.

And how many BPS schools have 501 and is this information public? And if not, why? Um, I don't remember that answer.

Yeah, we, uh, we don't, um, we don't have a sort of historical way of reporting on that. Um, so it's certainly something we could discuss. The last time we pulled all the data together, which was updated through the 2024 fiscal year, because the 2025 updates aren't fully filed yet. Um, I know it's. There were 42 schools that at one point or another had a friends of or affiliated 501c3. A number of those we think are potentially defunct. So I think the real answer is probably less than 42. Okay. But we don't have better information than that for now.

Yeah.

Be willing to share that information with you that we have.

I would love that. And I know that, you know, Pam mentioned being able to support some of the schools, but not all the schools have website, which is kind of like, we need to work on that too. Not every school has a functioning website. I don't know why. There is reporting that has been mandated, I guess it was amended in 2021 by the superintendent. I'm not sure if you are familiar with that.

But anyways. Can I interject really quickly and just add that, and again, I mentioned this earlier, but of the, what's the total count of schools right now, David or Anne, is it 109 official schools? We have funds for all 109 of them. So even though a school does not have a friends of, the Hernandez is a perfect example. They have a friends of, pretty strong friends of, and they have a BEDF account. So there are many schools, if not most of them, that use us as their main service, as their main fiscal sponsor.

That's amazing. I'm telling you, we need to give Pamela a whole department at BPS, because six people is not holding it down here. And I believe there was a superintendent circular that said that all 501c3s need to report to them. but the district has never really enforced it. And I think that if we're talking about reporting and there are some policies in place for this, it's just really also some enforcement that we may potentially need to do. And so I think it's something worth considering. For me, I think it's important that when we have hearings, the goal is to listen and then go back and think about where are some of the things that we could potentially work on collaboratively to fix. And the goal is to deliver on those things because people don't wanna show up for a meeting about a meeting and nothing happens, right? So our goal is to take the lessons that we've learned here and what was shared and really start maybe putting together a working group so that we can start drafting some policies and modeling New York, because New York and Boston are very competitive, and so they're ahead of us in this one. And I think we have an opportunity. It's just reporting. It's transparency. It doesn't really cost much according to, you know, just putting up the Excel sheet right onto your website. I mean, it should not be complicated. And I think that if we really want to restore trust in government, that this is a really good step in towards that direction, given all of those discrepancies that we have been having regarding our budgets and all this, that or the other. So my hope is that we have three people signed up for public testimony. Not sure if you all want to stay and listen, but you're more than welcome to. But I do want to thank everyone, our panelists, our experts, our advocates for showing up and sharing their expertise. It's really important for this work, for us to be speaking all in one voice. Well, not in one voice, but collectively to get into what we need to be. Thank you for your time. And I'm gonna be transitioning to public testimony unless anyone here has something that they need to say before we transition. All right, thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon. I'm gonna be transitioning to public testimony. I believe we have three people signed up. So Ethan, if you could start letting folks in, that would be great. Thank you, Pamela. Thank you, David. Thank you, Dr. Clark. Thank you, Travis. Thank you everyone that showed up and showed up as a piece. Thank you.

Okay.

Public testimony. Who we got on deck? We have Eugenia and Megan Wolf. On my list I see. And while we wait, I wanna thank Quest for bringing this to our office and your steadfast leadership and dedication to equity across all of our Boston public schools. We really wanna work in partnership with you all. You heard it here, we got it on the record. They did say they don't have any problems. So let's see once we start really pushing what kind of issues we may encounter. Our goal is to loop back with Quest and other advocates. And Pamela, we'd love to have you at the table helping shape what this is going to look like. And, you know, this is structural reform. And I think that these little things that we do can make a big difference in terms of the work. So looking forward to working with Quest to do just that. So thank you, Travis, and to your entire team for your leadership here.

Thank you for your leadership, Councilor. We really appreciate the time today.

Yeah, thank you. All right, so we have people signed up. We have Sarah, Mary Battenfield, and Megan Wolfe, and we need them to all be panelists even. If they can accept the panelists invitation, please. Or Megan.

Sarah and Mary are on.

We're just waiting on Megan to accept the problem. Okay, so then, okay, sorry, I did not see that. Okay, so who came in first? Sarah. Sarah. All right, Sarah.

Hi, everyone. Two minutes. My name is Sarah Delori. I am a member of Quest and also a parent of two children in BPS. This year, my daughter is at BLA and my son is at the Sarah Roberts School of the New School in Roslindale. And for our first seven years as a BPS family, my children were students at the Mildred Ave, K-8, and Mattapan. When my oldest child began K-1 at the Mildred, there was no formally established SPC. In fact, after many years of trying but gaining no traction, an SPC was finally set up during my daughter's third grade year, which was our fifth year at the school. It was a small group of four to five committed parents and guardians who would consistently show up to meetings and help to organize events. We did our best to fundraise, hoping to be able to pay for some fun events for the students. The first year that we were active, our goal was to be able to organize and pay for the children to have a field day, which they had never had in our time at the school. We first tried selling Mildred Ave branded items at school drop off once per week. The most expensive item that we sold was a car magnet, which we were trying to remember, but I believe it was either five or $8. Unfortunately, the fundraising aspect of this was largely unsuccessful as many of the families just did not have the money to spare to buy these things. In the end, most of what we sold was actually sold to students and staff would use their own cash at the beginning of the day to buy the students pencils. The most successful fundraiser we ever had was an election day bake sale. We raised $600 that day. In the three years that I was actively involved with the SPC, the most money that we ever had at one time was about $1,200. I do not remember ever receiving a cash donation. Almost all of that money was from selling baked goods, honestly, but a few from pencils and magnets. Then last year, my children both started at the new Sarah Roberts School in Roslindale. And while both the Sarah Roberts and the Mildred Ave schools were filled with caring parents, caring and dedicated parents who wanted the best for their children, it very quickly became clear that there was a huge difference in the fundraising capacities at the two schools. I went to the first SPC meeting of the year, and again, it was a brand-new school. And even though it was a brand-new school, parents had already established a 501 organization by that first meeting to support fundraising at the school. During that 1st year, I actually don't know exactly how much money was raised throughout the school. The year again, a call for transparency, but the most fun, the most successful fundraising event of the year. I do know the 1 big annual fundraiser 1 night event made over 25,000 dollars in that 1 night. Which was far and away more money than we ever raised in our 7 years at the Mildred school and. And while those two schools are both public elementary schools within the same school district, I only have access to this information about how much money they raised because I was involved and went to the SPC meetings at those two respective schools. This data is not currently being collected. There is nowhere that a parent, a donor, a policymaker, or an educator can go and look online to access this information. And I want to be clear, as others have been, that this is not about pitting schools against each other or resenting families who have the ability to give generously to their children's schools. Every parent I have met at both of my children's schools wants the same thing, a well-rounded experience for their children and for teachers to not have to make up for budget gaps. Thank you. I'm sorry. Are you almost done, Sarah? Just a couple more sentences. I just want to say I support the call for a public dashboard to track this data. If we are seriously about ensuring that every school and every student in the district has the resources they need to be successful, the first step is to simply see the full and accurate picture of the funds that each school has access to. We can't fix a disparity that we cannot see. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah.

And I think I bought all those cupcakes and the cookies that election day and helped you raise those. I do remember you all out there. All right. So I think we have Mary next. Mary, you have two minutes. I'll try to be fast.

And I can't devote a couple of my time to thanking you, Counselor, for chairing this hearing so amazingly amid personal loss. I have three graduates of Boston Public Schools and have been at six different schools from one, the Hannigan, which has very little money, to one, Boston Arts Academy, which has lots of money. And I could tell a lot of anecdotes about this, but as Mark Trager said, it's important to move from anecdote to evidence-based, and that's what having a dashboard is about. So I just wanted to note a couple of things. First of all, overall, The data on school private fundraising and school funds is that the schools that have less serve students who need more. And that is racialized. That means schools that serve high proportion of Black and Hispanic students, high proportions of English language learners, have less. To use the BAA, for example. I love BAA. I think Anne Clark's still on. But BAA, Boston Arts Academy, has, I think, 5% English language learners. The Hennigan has, I think, close to 70%. So when we did our 2021 Quest report on private fundraising, I asked a student, a former student, Erica Lee, to do a linear regression analysis. The analysis revealed that for every 1% increase in Black and Hispanic student enrollment at a Boston public school, private fundraising decreased by an average of $35 per student. If you look at the New York City data, and again, great that we have that transparency. It tells us a lot of things, but it doesn't solve the problem. So in the New York City data, For example, you can see that District 2, which is on the Upper East Side, Midtown, which is one of the wealthiest and whitest, has only 8.3% of students in that district are Black. They had an ending balance in their account of $15.5 million. District 23 in Brooklyn, which is nearly 100% Black and Hispanic, had only $5,000. Overall, when you look at that data on the New York City thing, what you see is that the top 30 schools, which in New York is only 2.5% because they're so big, but the top 30 schools in New York raised half of the total amount of money raised. 390 schools, as Councillor Traeger emphasized, had none. And I want to note also that while I appreciate The EDF, the work, making sure parents have access to fundraising training and things, that's not enough. Some parent communities have the social capital to access external funds and some don't. For example, Young Achievers, where my kids went, had a long time as friends of Young Achievers, but they didn't have a large staff like the Boston Arts Academy Foundation. They didn't hold fundraisers at the Seaport Hotel. We didn't have families or access to wealthy donors who were able to pay top dollar for those tickets. So how we address these clear and racialized inequities and not only funds themselves, but access to fundraising is for a longer community conversation. I'm very looking forward to the agreement and happy about the agreement that we get the data first and have it out transparently. But then as Councillor Mejia said, we need to seek solutions. And so I look forward to the work we can do together to transparently both share and ultimately address private fundraising disparities. Thanks. Thank you.

Thank you. Just for the record, I did let Mary go on a little longer. She's been on this quest much longer than any of us here. And so I wanted to honor you and just how much you've been dedicated to this conversation. So thank you. I am looking forward to doing the good work and it's important for us to get these things on the record so that we can then figure out where do we go from here. And you guys already walked into this with a very clear mandate. And so we are looking forward to working in partnership with you all to do just that. So I am going to close the hearing. I believe we don't have anyone else signed up for public testimony. Nope, we're all set. Okay, great. So I wanted to just thank, again, the panelists and everyone for showing up the way that you did, especially with, I knew it was going to be a sensitive topic. This is not a topic that most people want to talk about, but I'm glad that my colleagues showed up to do just that. So I want to also thank my council colleagues. who showed up and I'm looking forward to their partnership so that we can get the work done. So wanted to just note that for the record, this hearing on docket 0406 has been adjourned. Thank you everyone. Have a beautiful night. Bye.