Has your grocery bill gone up? Mine too. So have my other bills. Personal budgets aren’t the only ones taking a hit. Businesses have also seen a rapid increase in expenses.
For school districts, these same inflationary pressures have led to an across-the-board increase in expenses—everything from utilities and construction costs to employee salaries, materials and supplies. As a result, budget deficits are looming, and districts are looking for any way to avoid falling further behind when it comes to maintaining facilities.
Among the few levers administrators have in this balancing act is the funding they receive for community use of school facilities.
Did you say, “funding for community use?”
Yes. As in, having budgetary dollars allocated specifically to offset the expense of non-district organizations using school facilities. Every school district administrator in America is thinking to themselves… “Who gets funding for community use?
Within the current way of thinking, the only “funding” of community use comes from the fees assessed to the user and collected by the district. Determining those fees and who pays them along with developing and implementing the other policies that govern facility use can be challenging for a school district. Often, it’s a matter of navigating a myriad of political, ethical and financial interests.
While most districts have a range of board-approved rate and fee categories intended to be charged to outside groups for their use of school facilities, these rates often don’t come close to covering the cost of utilities, supplies, maintenance and wear and tear. We asked 30 school districts in Texas and found that over 90% estimate their highest rate category failed to recoup the actual cost of facility use. And thanks to inflation, that gap is widening.
So, if community groups aren’t covering the entire cost of their facility use, exactly who makes up the difference? The answer is the school district. And more specifically, from facilities and maintenance budgets intended to cover the expenses of school use, not community use. “The money your BA gives you, that’s for Monday thru Friday. It doesn’t cover Saturdays, it doesn’t cover Sundays and it definitely doesn’t cover holidays,” says Todd Amiet, educational facilities manager at the Freehold Township School District in New Jersey.
Why aren’t community groups covering costs?
Not only are most school districts’ rates set too low to recover costs, but a host of individual exceptions to those rate policies, along with a lack of oversight regarding which groups go into which rate categories, make the problem even worse. Decision-making can be fragmented among school officials, influenced by personal relationships or based on historical arrangements that haven’t been reviewed in years or even decades.
Arguably the problem is that the mindset, even for school boards and administrators, is focused on the hardship of the cost to the user rather than the cost to the school district. The result is that each exception, each well-intentioned decision to waive fees or assign a group to a discounted rate category, adds to the overall expense borne by the district each and every time a facility is used. As the idiom goes, it’s a “death by a thousand cuts.”
Read more from DA: These 6 states saw the largest growth in home school enrollment since 2017
This problem might be seen in a completely different way if there were greater transparency and a reframing of the way that community use “funding” is viewed. Because the fact is that any time a school district allows a non-district organization to access school facilities, if the entire cost of providing that access isn’t borne by the user then the school district is funding the difference. In a manner of speaking, the school district is contributing funds directly to the user group by covering a portion of their expense.
Supporting community programs
The idea that school districts would want to fund community use makes perfect sense. There has long been support for programs that are either school-affiliated, provide for school-age children, or in some way align with the vision and mission of the district. Think of organizations like PTA or Cub Scouts. Districts provide support for these programs by contributing all of part of the cost of their use of district facilities—in essence, funding these organizations.
But most districts, dare I say no district, keeps a running tally of how much expense it bears on behalf of the many organizations using their facilities.
According to “Policy Framework for Joint Use: Enabling and Supporting Community Use of K-12 Public School Facilities,” a white paper published by the 21st Century School Fund and the Center for Cities & Schools, districts should do just that.
To adequately fund community use, according to the paper, districts must know the cost of providing school buildings and grounds and “maintain accurate records on the terms of use and lease agreements, the spaces used, the fees paid, and the programs and services provided.” Furthermore, it recommends that this information “should be stored and made accessible to the public.”
Imagine a records request or school board budget meeting featuring a list of organizations who utilized school buildings and grounds showing not how much money the groups paid the school district, but how much money the school district contributed to each individual organization in support. This amount could be easily calculated by showing the total utilization (in hours) of school facilities by an organization, the actual cost of that use, and the amount that organization paid to cover those costs. The difference in dollars would equal how much money in public funds was contributed to that organization by the district.
With this level of transparency, it will likely be difficult for a district to justify or reconcile the inevitable inequity of why certain groups received priority over others and why certain groups merited different levels of financial support.
According to Amiet, “You get all your numbers together and you put that in front of them (the school board) so they can see it on a screen, then the dollars mean something completely different.”
