Gloucester schools go shopping for help

Joining cash-strapped school districts across the state in a move toward corporate support for public education, Gloucester's newest fundraising plan asks residents to help their neighborhood schools by going shopping.

Since June, Superintendent Christopher Farmer has been working on a deal with EdNets, a Wakefield Internet company, to build a new, improved, district Web site and allow Gloucester to join OurKidsWin!, an EdNets program that directs local business toward merchants that promise to send a cut of their sales back to the schools.

If the plan works as designed, Gloucester public schools will get a new Web site and an injection of cash from businesses, while the businesses will see an increase in Gloucester customers and EdNets will pull in several thousand dollars in fees taken out of the donations.

The Gloucester Fishermen Athletic Association will serve as an intermediary between the school system and businesses, collecting the donations and managing the program.

"There is a recognition that we need to look at other revenues and cannot get them by raising the price of milk each year," School Committee Chairman Greg Verga said yesterday. "If it means private money and people get something out of it, that's OK."

The arrangement with EdNets, expected to be finalized in August, is the latest in a series of moves by the city's schools to find new sources of revenue, including selling billboard space at playing fields and taking over the concessions at city beaches.

And the effort to bring corporate players into fundraising has likely just gotten started.

The School Committee has already approved commercial signs on school buses (it is looking for a nonprofit to manage them), and the Gloucester Education Foundation, a major source of contributions, is exploring a similar deal to EdNets that would direct a cut of credit card sales back to the foundation.

"With rising fixed costs such as fuel, corporate sources are valuable tools to aid local groups," Joe Rosa, vice president of the Education Foundation, said yesterday. "What we are trying to do is identify an organization where there is no cost and all the money would go back to GEF."

Jonathan Pope, co-president of the Gloucester Fishermen Athletic Association, said recently that he expects advertising revenue and commercial sources to be an increasingly vital source of money for his organization.

Aside from the EdNets deal, the athletic association now rents space for around 20 signs at fields in the city and hopes to increase that number.

When Gloucester completes its deal with EdNets, it will join 11 other cities and towns in New England participating in OurKidsWin!, including Weymouth, Marlborough, North Reading, Smithfield, R.I., and Medford.

Medford's EdNets-run Web site, more visually sophisticated than Gloucester's current home page, has simpler navigation and moving animated mustang images in honor of the school's athletic mascot.

No advertising is placed on the site's home page, only a 2-inch-high box with links to "Support Medford Public Schools. Join Now."

The link leads to a registration page where visitors, presumably residents, enter their personal information and credit card numbers. When the credit card is used at a participating local store, a percentage of the total sale is donated to the school district where the person registered.

The percentage of each sale donated varies for each merchant and can be as little as 1 percent and as high as 30 percent. In the case of Medford, the majority of participating local stores give back less than 5 percent.

The list of local merchants in OurKidsWin! varies from community to community and the list of participants for Gloucester has yet to be determined.

EdNets also has a list of 500 participating online businesses — including Target, Starbucks, and Southwest Airlines — offering rebates when purchases are made through the school Web site.

In Weymouth, EdNets allows the school district to collect all donations in the first six weeks of the program, then recoups its fee of $223,000 over the next three years, before turning all donations back to the schools again.

As school districts have begun searching for new sources of revenue, businesses have become eager to maximize the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns by linking them to worthy causes in a strategy called "cause marketing."

But even as corporate fundraising builds momentum in public schools, members of the school community say business support should not take the place of community involvement and residents should not buy a new plasma television instead of sending a check to the local PTO or education foundation.

"It is critically important that schools have financial support, but you cannot rely entirely on external forces. That is not going to solve the problem," Rosa of the GEF said. "There are school systems that work even better than this one with less money, because of community involvement."

Verga said the school district was treating skeptically any revenue projections made by EdNets and had not plugged any anticipated donations from OurKidsWin! in next year's budget. With no upfront costs for the schools, the School Committee would treat any new money as a bonus, he said.

Attempts to reach EdNets representatives for revenue estimates were unsuccessful.

"Like the concession stands, I would rather try it and then in a year or two decide it was not worth the effort than not have tried it," Verga said. "We get a new Web site that will allow us to communicate and collect information, something we are doing anyway. And the ads are not in your face."

While the model for OurKidsWin! generated a unanimous vote from the School Committee to authorize Farmer to negotiate a deal, the committee has not said yes to every revenue opportunity that has been presented in the past, Verga said, such as proposals to have radio-style messages and ads piped inside buses a few years ago.

"I think the guideline we have is the smell test: if it doesn't look right or sound right, it isn't right," Verga said. "We are up for discussing anything. It doesn't hurt to discuss it."

Patrick Anderson can be reached at panderson@gloucestertimes.com.

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