Schools Plus seeks to help ease Santa Rosa school cuts

This is not the first time John Bribiescas, a retired teacher and founding member of Schools Plus, has seen a budget crisis rip a hole in Santa Rosa City Schools' budget.

In 1991, when Sonoma County's largest school district was on the verge of chopping spring sports because of funding woes, Schools Plus produced its first telethon.

The community rallied behind the concept and spring sports survived. So did many of the music and arts programs that Schools Plus supported.

In the intervening years Schools Plus soared. The volunteer-run non-profit organization doled out more than $2 million to elementary, middle and high school sports, arts and music programs.

But in recent years the emergence of individual campus foundations and support groups has largely supplanted Schools Plus. After a few years of dwindling returns on its annual telethon, the group cancelled its signature fundraiser in 2008 but kept alive a golf tournament and other small events, and also relies on direct contributions.

Although the telethon has been dormant, Schools Plus has not. Last month, the group gave $65,000 to Santa Rosa's high schools and middle schools. Board members also have revamped the group's web site and signed on with local food manufacturer SavorStart to develop a student-created salsa label that will direct about 75 percent of the profit from salsa sales to Schools Plus.

So while the decision last week to cut $5.6 million from Santa Rosa City Schools, including the $250,000 that was to fund 2011 spring sports, Bribiescas said Schools Plus is in a unique position to help.

"We've been reinventing ourselves for the last two years and we are there now," he said. "We are alive and well."

He said Schools Plus will be looking for ways to help the district, and part of the will be encouraging a new wave of parents to participate in the program.

Campus foundations and boosters raise money for individual schools, but Schools Plus is the only local organization dedicated to distributing money to all five high schools and all five middle schools, Bribiescas said.

"If Elsie Allen and Piner don't have the same capability with their parent population, then you don't have anybody to play," he said. "The whole NBL (North Bay League) is worried about what this cut means."

"Our mission has always been that we have always taken care of all those schools equally," he said. "If they start charging fees to participate in the various sports, a lot of those kids won't be able to participate."

That concern isn't confined to one or two campuses, said Maria Carrillo High parent Tani Scheiner. The option to sign her freshman son up for yet another a traveling baseball squad as a replacement for playing for the Pumas might not be viable, she said.

"The kind of club ball that you need for exposure to college coaches requires a lot of traveling and expense," she said. "Kids who have potential but not money are behind everybody else."

Parent Terri Acuna Thorne credited Schools Plus with coming to the rescue again, but said a longer term solution in the face of at least $4.7 million in additional cuts to the 2011-12 school must be more structural.

"We may be able to stave off not having to quit these things right now, but we will have to cut other things eventually and eventually it will lead to sports and arts and music," she said.

School board president Bill Carle credited Schools Plus for re-igniting efforts to rally the community behind specific programs, but said long term budgetary solutions are a must.

"I think it would be wrong for us as policy makers to say &‘OK, this is being covered by an outside nonprofit, so let's just forget about it,' " he said. "I think what Schools Plus can do for us is augment, not replace."