Math Snafu Shows Park Slope School Raised $76M

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — Sorry kids, despite what the numbers say, your Brooklyn school won't be trading school buses for a private jet anytime soon.

Numbers released by the Department of Education Monday showed a Park Slope elementary school's parent-teacher association raked in $76 million last year.

Unfortunately, it was a math snafu. A badly placed decimal point showed the astronomical amount instead of the actual cash raised – a still impressive $760,000.

The numbers, reported for the first time for PTAs across New York City, showed that P.S. 133 on the Park Slope-Boerum Hill border had about $27 million in the bank before the start of the year, brought in another $76 million in 2018 and spent about $74 million that year, according to the report, which is still on the DOE's website.

Parent leaders said the exorbitantly high totals — much higher than some of the top fundraising schools who brought in around $1 million — were likely because of a mistake when putting them into the report, which was compiled by DOE officials after PTA's self-reported their budgets.

"The error in reporting on our numbers was that they were entered into the DOE’s system with the decimal point in the wrong place," PS 133 PTA Co-President Jennifer Skoda said. "If it’s moved two places to the left on all numbers, you have the correct amounts."

DOE officials contended that they reached out to PTAs several times to correct any inaccuracies before releasing the report, adding that they cannot guarantee specific numbers are accurate given that it is based on self-reported amounts. The department is working on ways to ensure the report is more accurate in future years, a spokesperson said.

Still, even despite the $75-million clerical error, the report made headlines for the large gaps in how much money schools across the city are raising for their students.

Only a small portion of parent-teacher associations reported raising more than $1,000 per student, or upwards of $1 million total, while hundreds of other such school groups said they raised no money at all, Chalkbeat reported.

"The data, released for the first time Monday, lays bare the funding disparities between schools in wealthy neighborhoods and those in higher poverty ZIP codes," the outlet said.

P.S. 133's $760,000 fundraising total was still at the high end of what schools raise citywide, though Skoda said a large part of that is because about $500,000 of the money raised goes to an after school program.

"We actually raise $200,000 - $250,000 in support of the school," she said. "That is a respectable amount but nowhere near the range of the organizations raising seven figures."

Skoda said that P.S. 133, though in the affluent zip code on Park Slope's border, is socio-economically diverse given that it draws students from two districts, including nearby Boerum Hill and as far as Bed-Stuy and Sunset Park.

The full story Chalkbeat on the PTA report can be found here.