BEYOND BAKE SALES

By Jill Smolowe

IN THE FRONT HALL OF THE DRISCOLL elementary school in Brookline, Massachusetts, a large chart displays the names of families that have contributed to a $30,000 fund-raising drive. Though the campaign has stirred controversy in this middle-class community, the participating parents are unapologetic. As they see it, their kids need classroom computers; the public school has no budget for such amenities. So parents are digging into their own pockets to purchase 26 Apple computers by this fall. True, the Driscoll students will then have an advantage over those who attend Brookline's seven other primary schools. But, says Deborah Rivlin, whose two kids attend Driscoll, "I'm not going to stand on principle while my children suffer.''

The problem is that the Driscoll effort threatens to disrupt a principle that is cherished in liberal Brookline--the principle of equity, which holds that all the public schools in the town should be comparably funded, equipped and staffed. Thus when a father offered to donate $40,000 to cover the cost of an additional kindergarten teacher, the school turned him down, prompting the father to send his child to a private school. And when another parent offered to donate $100,000 worth of computer equipment to the Heath School, he had to agree to divvy up the equipment equally among the town's K-8 facilities. "Public schools are for everybody," argues Gerald Kaplan, principal of Brookline's Devotion elementary school. "It is my very strong feeling that no child should be more entitled than other children."

But in an era of property-tax caps and budget cutbacks, no child is entitled to much; these days state and local funding for education is stretched just to cover the basics. Class sizes are inching up; music, sports and other activities are being eliminated. In communities rich enough for parents to pitch in and pay for some of these "extras,'' there is an understandable impulse to do so. In the Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, for example, the Parent Volunteer Association of the Joseph Sears primary school raised $92,000 last year to build a new playground. Similarly, a parent booster club at the Kenter Canyon elementary school in tony Brentwood, California (where one parent periodically sends her gardener over to tend the grounds), raised $78,000 to subsidize a computer instructor, a librarian, a music and art teacher and teachers' aides. "If we didn't have money from the parents," says Hillary Krieger, a PTA president who has two children enrolled at Kenter, "we'd really have meat-and-potatoes education."

But since they do have the money, say opponents of parent donations, there's a greater likelihood that in the long run more and more schools will be left with scraps. "Fund raising doesn't respond to the real needs of schools. That's nickels and dimes," says Robert Weintraub, principal of Brookline High School. "Brookline has lost $4 million in state funds [in recent years]. It creates a cycle of abandonment."

Plainly, the days when taxpayers subsidized the full costs of public education are gone. But Americans-who are just as quick to decry education cuts as they are to embrace tax caps-have yet to agree on the proper role of private funds. For now, the debate is local-and intensely heated. "We've looked at the issue of equity over the years, and we've been stymied,'' says Bob Early, principal of the Taylor Ranch School in Venice, Florida, which raises about $20,000 annually. "This is a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Parents want their efforts to benefit their kids, and any program to redistribute funds is not at all popular."

Brentwood's Kenter Canyon is a case in point. In contrast to contributing the $78,000 last year to the booster club for additional staff, parents gave only $5,000 to the PTA, which can't subsidize salaries and must turn over 20% of its revenues to a citywide fund for disadvantaged students. "Some parents become very hostile about how hard we work, and then have to turn over a chunk of it downtown," says PTA president Krieger.

Many middle-class parents are particularly resentful that while their own fund drives draw fire, corporate efforts to help schools are applauded. In Los Angeles more than 1,000 businesses and foundations have "adopted" 650 of the area's schools, donating volunteer time, money and equipment. "The schools that are sexy to corporations are in poor areas," says a local PTA president. "When you talk about inequity in the public schools, the inequity really is to the [affluent] Westside."

Such sentiments reflect the frustration parents feel at being caught between the competing demands that they participate in their kids' schools-but not too much. "We need a policy that does not penalize parents for getting involved," says Professor Richard Elmore of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Or, for that matter, reduce education financing to the level of auctions and bake sales.

--Reported by Sam Allis/Boston and Tara Weingarten/Los Angeles

With reporting by SAM ALLIS/BOSTON AND TARA WEINGARTEN/ LOS ANGELES