For the first time in years, Palo Alto’s Partners in Education, a non-profit organization that raises money for the district’s public schools, has failed to reach their funding target.

 

In August 2016, PiE launched their annual fundraising campaign, aiming to secure $5.6 million in donations for the 2017-18 school year. While targets have been reached between late February and early March in the past, the organization is seeing a donation gap this time around and will most likely end the year under their goal.

 

Given this deficit, PiE is pushing for more contributions and has been asking school principals to send out emails urging parents to support the organization.

 

Since being founded in 2005 to compensate for the low funding allocated to California public schools, PiE has donated more than $30 million to the Palo Alto Unified School District to support science and art enrichment, emotional well-being programs, and additional electives.

 

However, most of the funding is utilized to pay for personnel. Last year, Paly received more than $800,000 from PiE, with around ninety percent going to guidance counselors, outreach counselors, and teacher advisors, according to Paly Principal Kimberly Diorio.

 

But with the unanticipated drop in donations this year, many of these provisions could possibly be reduced, if not completely canceled.

 

“[PiE funding] is pretty necessary,” Diorio says. “But I’m not too worried since I think Paly has enough of a buffer so we can pay for personnel costs even with the deficits.”

 

However, despite staff staying intact, some benefits will not be able to be implemented. As the limited college counseling services at Paly have been unable to support the needs of students, with many unable to schedule meetings, Diorio has hoped for a while to hire an additional college advisor. But the lack of donations combined with district budget cuts makes this possibility seem unlikely to happen.

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While PiE funding provides many benefits for the Palo Alto school district, Diorio says that none of them are essential to the core of education.

“We’ll make it work,” she says. “The idea is to keep the impact out of the classroom.”