The Shawnee Mission school board could soon finalize new procedures aimed at addressing disparities in school-based donations. One goal of the move is to more closely scrutinize funds raised to pay for additional staff positions.
To prevent inequity in donations that may allow some schools to gain educational advantages over others, the school board’s policy committee on Monday afternoon reviewed a draft of an updated district donation policy as well as a procedure for reviewing so-called community-funded staff positions.
A community-funded position is a Shawnee Mission employee whose wage is paid for through donations raised through private giving, like a PTA fundraiser or a donor’s gift to a school. Examples of community-funded positions include classroom aides and interventionists.
There are only a handful of such positions in the district, but to some board members, they represent a stark example of inequities that exist among the district’s wealthier schools and those that can’t raise money to pay for additional staffers.
Monday’s policy review came after a special task force of three school board members — Jessica Hembree, David Westbrook, and Jamie Borgman — began studying school-by-school donation patterns last summer.
The task force found eye-opening disparities between schools, with the district’s wealthiest schools taking in the lion’s share of private donations.
The numbers showed that the schools in the Shawnee Mission East feeder pattern brought in more than $2 million over the previous three years, more than the other four high school feeder patterns combined.
After charging the district’s policy committee with considering the donation disparity issue, the district is now looking at updating its donation policy, as well as formalizing a process for reviewing funds that go specifically to pay for additional school staffers.
How did we get here?
The special task force began meeting in June 2024 following concerns about donation disparities expressed by Hembree in a board meeting earlier that year.
“Whether it’s fair or not fair, there’s a perception that there are wealthy schools in Shawnee Mission and they have a whole different set of experiences,” such as more reading specialists and nicer facilities, Hembree said at the time.
By July, the three-board member task force found that schools in the SM East feeder pattern — the area of the district, generally, with the lowest percentage of students who receive free or reduced lunch (a common proxy for gauging student and family income levels) — had taken in $2.15 million in donations the previous three school years.
Schools in the Shawnee Mission North feeder pattern came in a distant second, totaling $250,000 over the same period, followed by SM Northwest with $195,000, SM South with $149,000 and SM West with $110,000.
The task force also expressed particular concern about donations that helped pay for what the district calls community-funded staff positions.
Such staff positions funded by outside donations or fundraisers over the previous two years went to the more affluent schools, with nearly all such donations — about 97% — going to schools with less than 20% of its students on free or reduced lunch.
During the 2024-25 school year, there were just 11.6 full-time employees listed as community-funded positions in the entire district, out of a total staff of roughly 3,800 employees.
That number dropped even lower in the current school year to only 6.5 employees.
Still, by last August, the special task force had charged the policy committee with figuring out how to limit the practice of using community-raised dollars to pay for staff positions that might give students in more affluent schools access to additional staffers not available in other schools.
A look at revisions in the overall policy
The draft revisions district administrators have made to the district’s donations policy largely focus on how to review money for community-funded staff positions.
The bulk of the changes in the policy that address community-funded positions appear in a reworked section that outlines how the district can accept such donations.
A new opening paragraph to the section states that administrators can recommend that the board of education accept a donation and that the board will review all such recommendations regarding donations with the authority to approve or deny the money.
Under the revisions, the district proposes the following procedure on how to review community-funded positions:
- Donations cannot be accepted to fund full-time or part-time positions, including classroom teachers, but should go primarily to positions like teachers’ aides and classroom interventionists.
- Donations cannot be accepted for classroom or special education teachers, or staff positions that are not present at other schools at the same level (such as counselors in elementary schools).
- Donors who want to fund an extra staff position must complete an application that will be evaluated by district officials.
- The superintendent will be charged with recommending to the school board whether to approve or deny a donation that will pay for an additional staff position.
- If the board ultimately approves a donation request for a community-funded staff position, the district will still be responsible for hiring and supervising that individual.
The draft policy can be found in the embedded document below on pages 1 to 6. The following pages include information about the procedure that corresponds with the draft policy.
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Open in new tab SMSD’s proposed procedure for reviewing requests
The policy committee also reviewed a draft laying out further details for reviewing and approving community-funded staff positions.
According to the draft, it will involve two district-level committees.
The first committee will rate a donation for a community-funded staff position along a variety of factors, including alignment with school/district goals, student demographics at a school and staffing ratios and extra support already at a school.
If an application to fund a community-funded staff position receives a high enough score from that first committee, a second committee will look at the application against a rubric that outlines other factors, including a school’s academic need and the sustainability of the proposed funding.
Both committees’ scores will be averaged, giving the applicant a final total score that will then determine if the position can be funded through private donations.
The deadline to submit applications each year will be Feb. 1, under the draft policy, and applications will make it to the board of education by the following board meeting in March. Any accepted applications will go into effect the following academic year.
The policy committee weighs in
Generally, the policy committee expressed support for the updated donations policy, which mirrors that of the current process for hiring principals, board member Heather Ousley pointed out.
Westbrook, an at-large school board member who was also a member of the task force that first brought the donations issue to the fore last year, commended district officials’ work on the policy on what “is a tough issue,” noting the need to balance a concern for equity across the district with some school communities’ ability and enthusiasm for fundraising.
Westbrook said he likes how the new policy outlines a process to follow while also protecting both equity and the spirit behind community donations.
Borgman, who represents the SM Northwest area and was also a special task force member, said she’d like to see some explicit language or response for applicants whose requests to offer a donation for a staff position are denied.
District administrators, the district’s general counsel and the policy committee revised the draft policy during Monday’s committee meeting to say whether an application is approved or denied, the school board will have the opportunity to review the decision.
Next steps:
- The policy committee agreed to have district administrators update the bottom of the policy with smaller edits, such as specifying the public’s point of contact for the process.
- District administration is to email an updated draft to the policy committee.
- Then, the drafted policy is expected to appear on the board of education at its April 14 workshop meeting.
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