Sad news abounds about Baltimore City public schools, including students? shockingly low test scores and notice that Bonnie Copeland, CEO of the school system, will depart this week. But happy news does exist about effective schooling alternatives for low-income local families.
Here it is:
Children?s Scholarship Fund Baltimore, whose board I chair, provides privately funded, partial scholarships for children from low-income Baltimore families, to help them attend schools their parents choose.
Last year we helped 541 children attend 81 different private schools, charging an average tuition of $4,700. Surprisingly to some, more than 200 private schools exist in and around Baltimore, not counting the expensive prep schools.
CSF Baltimore selects children for the program from our waiting list by lottery, so that every child has an equal chance for better schooling. The program exists for any and every low-income Baltimore child whose parents want better schooling for him or her, not just the brightest kids or the best athletes. And we select by family, not child, so that if one sibling wins a scholarship, all the others in the family do, too.
As money becomes available, families are drawn from a large waiting list of families that have applied. Without advertising, we have more than 2,000 children who wait and hope for a scholarship.
After our well-publicized launch in 1999, we received applications on behalf of 20,145 children. That equaled an astonishing 44 percent of the income-eligible children in the city.
By design, we give partial scholarships. We provide 25 percent, 50 percent or 75 percent of the family?s tuition, depending on per-person family income, up to a cap of $2,000. Last year, our average scholarship was $1,688, while the average parental contribution was $2,197. Even the poorest families must pay a minimum of $500 per child each year.
Why? In part because by operating this way, we stretch our funds to serve more families. More important, however, is that we want families to be genuinely responsible for their children?s education. That means financial responsibility. All we do is provide financial help. Parents choose the schools, apply, keep their children in good standing, and pay their share of tuition.
All donations for CSF Baltimore?s scholarships are doubled. Grants from the national Children?s Scholarship Fund, our parent organization in New York, and from the Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Foundation in Baltimore provide matching funds.
The scholarship funds are effectively matched again by our parents, who pay roughly half of tuition. All this matching means that gifts to CSF Baltimore get a lot of children out of troubled public schools and into schools their parents prefer.
For an illustration of how far the money can go, consider that tuition at Gilman Middle School next year is $18,815. That same amount, given to CSF Baltimore, would be doubled by our matching funds to $37,630. That amount is 22 times our average scholarship of $1,688 last year. In other words, for the price of one Gilman tuition, a donor to CSF Baltimore can help low-income parents get 22 additional children out of the Baltimore City public schools, and into safe, supportive, effective schools their parents choose.
The good news is that Baltimoreans concerned about city schooling don?t have to wait for politicians or the education bureaucracy to make a difference. CSF Baltimore bypasses politics and bureaucracy. We go right to the parents and say, “Send your children where you think best. We?ll help.” We are helping 541 children now, and hope to help more next fall.
Howard Baetjer Jr. is a lecturer in the Departmentof Economics at Towson University and chairman of the board of Children?s Scholarship Fund Baltimore. He can be reached at [email protected].
