Nettelhorst Community Group is revolutionizing the bake sale in Lake View. Can the same thing happen in other communities?

By Ben Myers
Editor

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

The transformation of Lake View’s Nettelhorst School from deteriorating facility to vibrant community landmark has been well-covered.

In the summer of 2002, a group of Lake View parents, who met each other as their toddlers played in neighborhood parks, approached Nettelhorst principal Susan Kurland about improving the school-the parents did not want to send their kids to magnet schools or move to the suburbs.

Kurland responded with a simple question. She asked what it would take for the parents to send their kids to Nettelhorst. The parents took it as an invitation to dream, and backed up their requests with action.

“They came back within a day and they had a really long list of all this stuff, and none of it was unrealistic,” Kurland said. “I remember saying ‘Well ladies, roll up your sleeves, you’ve got a lot of work to do.’”

And they got to work. They called themselves the Nettelhorst Parents Co-op and set about transforming the school. They did so with the grit and sweat it took to repaint floors and walls. They did it also by asking others to help.

In all, $500,000 of in-kind donations transformed the school. Paint, appliances and the installation of new lighting was provided at no cost. Artists painted murals over walls. There’s a community kitchen, a world music café, and photographic portraits of students lining the cafeteria walls. Someone put a dinghy in an aqua-themed hallway.

The physical improvements correlated with dramatic improvements on the Illinois Standard Achievement Tests: in 2002, 34 percent of third-grade, 35 percent of fifth-grade and 50 percent of eighth-grade students met or exceeded state goals for reading. By 2007, those numbers were 70, 71 and 77, respectively.

Now, a new generation of active parents is continuing the original group’s work-and expanding on the vision. The Nettelhorst Parents Co-Op morphed into the Nettelhorst Community Group, a registered nonprofit organization. And it includes a sophisticated fundraising team of 40 volunteers. They have a goal of raising $230,000 for a new science curriculum and seats for the auditorium.

Ted Ganchiff, who is spearheading Nettelhorst Community Group’s fundraising efforts, said he figured it would take 18 months to raise $110,000 for the science curriculum. They reached that sum in three months by partnering with foundations, corporations and alumni-”people who have a stake in seeing better education not just in Chicago, but in the nation,” Ganchiff said.

“We’re not handing over a proposal and saying get us a new gym,” Ganchiff said. “We’re saying we have something big and bold and important here, and we want you to be with us across all finish lines.”

Nettelhorst Community Group’s success stands out among similar organizations. Ganchiff noted a Catalyst Chicago study that found less than 3 percent of city schools have affiliated fundraising partners that raised more than $50,000 in the last three years.

Ganchiff cited the study to illustrate the need for communities across the city need to step up in the face of funding cuts.

According to the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a bi-partisan economic think tank in Chicago, Illinois is last in the nation in the percentage of school funding provided by state revenue. State revenues contribute 30 percent of Illinois school funding, compared with a national average of 51 percent.

In light of this, Ganchiff said parents need to adjust their thinking.

“The fundraising culture is a mindset for parents,” Ganchiff said. “Private schools have it in spades. They have to. It’s like churches and NPR.”

Ganchiff was careful to note that the Nettelhorst Community Group does not include fundraising experts. He said the research, consulting and networking amounts to a full-time job. Private fundraising is the future of public school financing, Ganchiff said, and the onus for creating great schools is on the communities where the schools reside.

“The new reality is parents and people who are concerned about the quality of that school, or about education in general, are going to fill the gaps that the government is not going to fill,” Ganchiff said.

Ganchiff does not claim to have a blueprint for how to approach what he perceives to be a new era in school financing. But the Nettelhorst Community Group is working on a way to replicate its success. “School Funding in the New Millennium” is the tentative title of a symposium the group is planning for the spring of 2009. He said the idea occurred to him after speaking to parents at a west side magnet school that had failed.

“They said ‘how do we get parents involved with this? How do we motivate them? Once we motivated them, then what do we do? How do we set up a 501(c)(3)?’” Ganchiff said. “I was saying to myself, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have answers to all those questions so I didn’t have to sit there and watch them struggle?’”

Nettelhorst’s rejuvenation can be traced back Kurland’s challenge to a small group of Lake View parents. But are the results because of the challenge, or because of the people who responded to it?

Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, a Chicago parents’ advocacy group, applauded the Nettelhorst Community Group for thinking beyond its own borders, but cautioned that a community’s socioeconomic standing can influence the level of parent involvement.

“It’s much more difficult for a family that can barely afford to put food on the table to participate in a fundraiser for the school,” Woestehoff said. “It takes so much energy that it’s not possible to do that kind of activity.”

Nettelhorst’s academic gains have coincided with changing demographics. From 2005 to 2007, the percentage of low-income students dropped from 53 to 36. Woestehoff was not surprised by the correlation between Nettelhorst’s academic gains and demographic shift.

“I think those are two pieces of data that you really have to put side-by-side,” Woestehoff said. “Unfortunately, one of the best ways to change your test scores is to change your student body.”

But Nettelhorst Principal Cindy Wulbert, who took over when Kurland retired this year, believes what happened at Nettelhorst could happen anywhere.

“I think it’s possible for it to happen anywhere but the parents have to persevere-it’s a needed characteristic in making the changes.”

Contact: bmyers@chicagojournal.com
Source: ChicagoJournal.com