This year’s lineup features host Brian Muni, Sam Leopold, newcomers James and Andrea Rohlehr (from the group “aj”) and other surprise guests, including the recipients of this year’s REACH Young Songwriters Competition.

All submissions for the Songwriter Competition must be submitted by October 30, 2009.

Come and learn more about our fun and exciting events! Be part of our REACH team. Bring friends and meet fun and active people in your school district. This is an adults only event.

Desserts and coffee will be served. Looking forward to meeting you.

RSVP by October 10th to 357-5129 or info@reachfoundation.org

Dan Juechter worried that charity was dead. He’s not so worried anymore.

Juechter is president of Inspire Nyack, a foundation created in August 2007 to raise money to help fund Nyack school programs.

Last year, the group held its first fundraiser and garnered nearly $60,000 at a casino night, which translated into a $40,000 gift to Nyack schools after expenses were taken out.

The money went to pay for Nyack’s robotics classes.

With its first fundraiser so successful, Juechter scheduled the second annual casino night for Feb. 28. Then he watched as the economy worsened, people lost their jobs and proposed tax law changes would make charitable gift-giving less attractive.

The fundraiser would go on, Juechter and his board decided. And they crossed their fingers.

“We actually started seeing it prior to the event; we started to realize we were running out of space,” he said last week. “The upper room at Nyack Seaport holds 250 people and they agreed to open up the downstairs, which holds another 70 people. We had just under 300 people and raised just over $100,000. I was astounded.”

The foundation handed Nyack schools a check for $70,000 last week, money to pay for robotics and some left over for other programs to be decided by school administrators later.

“The foundation has been a wonderful support to the Nyack School District’s K-12 robotics/pre-engineering program,” said Superintendent of Schools Valencia Douglas. “With their assistance, we are poised to meet our five-year deadline for full implementation of the program and, in fact, to exceed it.”

Juechter said his faith in people’s support of the Nyack schools is holding strong.

“In these difficult times – and they are difficult, where everybody knows someone … who is affected by the economy by a loss of job or just difficulty in living – I’m hearing these stories from other people, that charity is increasing,” he said. “I think that’s a wonderful testimony to humanity that people are pulling together, that they’re giving their dollars and their time. It’s really a heart-warming feeling.”

Nyack’s isn’t the only school foundation to be happily surprised by the results of a fundraiser this winter.

Ramapo Central’s REACH Foundation held its annual dinner dance March 7 and raised about $20,000.

“We raised a lot of money, considering today’s economy, and we had about half the people we usually get at our events,” said Marci Linke, one of the REACH founders and current chairwoman of the board. “We’ve had a lot of people in our community who were laid off and struggling. We’re very grateful to the people who were able to come. It was an incredible amount of money to raise.”

REACH, which stands for Resource for Expanding Academic and Community Horizons, uses its funds for scholarships, grants and buildings and grounds work at the Ramapo Central schools.

Linke is winding up her career with REACH. She and her husband plan to move from the area in the next year or two, and the fundraiser also was an appreciation event for the 11 years she’s served.

She received the REACH Foundation award for service, and the student scholarships were renamed in her honor. They now are called the Marci Linke Outstanding Community Service Scholarships.

“I was so touched,” Linke said. “I felt like Cinderella. It was a wonderful evening.”

Copyright © The Journal News. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the Gannett Co., Inc.

Rockland districts’ late foray into establishing school foundations comes in the nick of time. Property taxpayers are stretched to the limits, yet schools must still offer sophisticated programs to help prepare students to enter a competitive marketplace.

High school band booster clubs, elementary school PTAs and other local efforts have long raised money for those “extras,” from field trips to office equipment

Foundations, like Ramapo Central school district’s REACH – Resource for Expanding Academics and Community Horizons – can fund extras that would be unlikely to make it into heavily scrutinized school budgets, amenities like landscaping for elementary schools, and a high school amphitheater. The decade-old organization also offers grants for teachers and student scholarships.

Foundations also can boost educational endeavors for a district. The newly formed Foundation to Inspire Excellence in Nyack Schools funded the expansion of a popular robotics program that started a few years ago for middle schoolers, so all students, even the youngest pupils, could take a turn at exploring science in a fun environment.

They allow a whole new level of volunteerism – writing grants, seeking corporate funding – that can get communities engaged in their local schools. They can also take some pressure off public school budgets, which must get the voters to approve their spending plans each year. In a tight economy, paying for more than the minimum becomes an increasingly hard sell.

“What a foundation does for us is to -not supplement, but add additional things we would not be able to do within our budget,” Dobbs Ferry schools Superintendent Debra Kaplan told to staff writer Randi Weiner this week. Her district has seen a $4.5 million contribution since its foundation formed in 1994. Real learning tools – a math lab at the middle school is just one – have been the result.

Where do foundations fit in the educational funding scheme? They are becoming a necessary charity that fills in the gaps that local taxpayers are less willing, and often unable, to provide. As Albany continues to foot-drag on instituting true school funding reforms, communities will continue to step in to ensure their school districts maintain quality through such innovations as foundations. Too bad state legislators weren’t so innovative during last month’s special session, in which they took a pass at getting the ball rolling on real property tax reform.

While parents, local businesses and school board members can support their school district by forming a foundation, we need more than charity to fix this mess. The state Legislature needs to be pushed to do its part, too. That starts with enacting a property tax cap, followed by a “circuit breaker” formula to ensure homeowners don’t lose huge chunks of their income to school property taxes, and followed up with state reforms of mandates that pass on costs to overburdened districts.

Foundations may be parental involvement on steroids, but now, New York’s schools – and the property taxpayers who support them – need all the breathing room they can provide.

It wasn’t that the school budget didn’t pay for the basics that caused parents in the Ramapo Central School District to decide to start a foundation, Marci Linke said.

It was that schools ought to offer more than the bare necessities – and that taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to fund them.

Ramapo Central’s REACH Foundation committee members Marci Linke, left, and Melanie Glassman participate in a food tasting at New York Country Club in New Hempstead. The committee is in the planning stages of its annual dinner-dance fundraiser, scheduled for March. (Mike Roy/The Journal News)

That was the beginning of Resource for Expanding Academics and Community Horizons, these days simply called the REACH Foundation. It was 1998, and Linke was one of the founding members.

“I really wanted to bring more funding to the schools via grants and corporate funding, and the only way to do it was with a foundation,” said Linke, also a member of the Ramapo Central Board of Education. “We sat around my kitchen table for a few years talking about it. Our concern was to bring the community into our schools and to bring innovative programs to the schools.”

School foundations are a growing part of parental involvement in schools, especially in New York, where public school budgets must get voter approval each year. In a continuing tight economic atmosphere, paying for more than minimal state requirements becomes an increasingly hard sell.

Rockland schools have come relatively late to the foundation movement; of the five operating foundations attached to local districts, four are less than 2 years old; North Rockland is considering starting one next year.

Foundations are more common than unusual among the Westchester and Putnam school districts, with more than half of them leaning on foundations for grants, new playgrounds, new programs and other supports, educators estimated.

The Hastings Education Foundation is typical of a long-term foundation. The foundation, created in 1996, now contributes as much as $75,000 in grants a year to the Hastings-on-Hudson teachers and schools. Most recently, it paid for wireless microphones used in the high school play. It’s paid for new equipment in the exercise room and to test out possible curriculum.

“There are a lot of things you want to do … but I think the challenge to us, in an era of diminishing resources, you have to see what’s realistic” to put in the school budget, said Schools Superintendent Robert Shaps.

Dobbs Ferry schools’ foundation has contributed $4.5 million to the district since its inception in 1994, said Schools Superintendent Debra Kaplan. It’s paid for pianos, a science research lab, the middle school math lab, professional development and a television studio.

“What a foundation does for us is to – not supplement, but add additional things we would not be able to do within our budget,” she said. “It’s amazing the kinds of things they support. They tremendously enrich the program.”

REACH, for example, offers grants of $10,000 to $15,000 to teachers, as well as student scholarships.

“After 10 years, people just know about REACH,” Linke said. “We hold dances, casino nights, wine tastings, and we just completed our fun run with over 11,000 people from the school and community. We built the amphitheater at Suffern High School and landscaped the high school and middle school. We’re landscaping each of the elementary schools and providing budgets to maintain the landscaping. In all, we’ve given out $100,000 in grants, which makes such an impact.”

Joseph Fitzgerald is on the other end of the foundation timeline. The state just recently accepted the paperwork to formally organize the Nanuet Schools Educational Foundation, and its first event was held in June to celebrate the district’s centennial and anniversaries of Highview and Miller schools.

“I’m an entrepreneur with several business interests, and (Nanuet Schools Superintendent) Mark McNeill pulled this foundation idea out. It’s been around for a few years but never got really started – and one of the things I’m good at … is starting things.

“I said I’d get this thing organized and set up a plan,” he said. “My object is to go off and chase grants for things the schools can’t go ask the people for.”

New this past school year, too, is the Foundation to Inspire Excellence in Nyack Schools. Dan Juechter is president of the foundation board and chairman of the executive committee.

“A group of us started talking about this in 2006, to figure out ways to help the school district enhance the educational experiences of our children,” Juechter said. “But instead of hitting parents in their pockets every week like the PTA or taxes, we wanted to work out a process to go through corporate philanthropy.”

It took more than a year of research and discussions with administrators and community members before the foundation got moving, he said.

Because Nyack has introduced robotics in the middle and elementary schools and wanted to expand the program to all grades, the foundation decided to help pay for the expansion immediately, instead of having it put in place over several years as money became available in the budget.

A casino night in February garnered more than $40,000, and a check for that amount was handed over to the district in the spring – 100 percent of the request for this past year’s funding.

“We felt we needed to get something on the ground quickly,” Juechter said. “Now we’re developing other projects to get our name out into the public, to get people talking about it.”

The Clarkstown Educational Foundation initially had difficulty starting up as well, parent Peter Kash said. When Schools Superintendent Margaret Keller-Cogan came to the district two years ago, she helped jump-start a new effort, he said.

“She called me … and said we need a foundation and pro-active citizenry,” he said. “I have four kids in the community. I recognize the competition our kids will have with the job market. I thought we could help the students at a level before they get to college. Maybe the foundation could have a huge impact, micro and macro.”

Clarkstown’s foundation celebrated its first anniversary in July.

The board members have one focus, he said: What can best help the district’s children. That’s why they have raised money for electronic whiteboards for classrooms, and are behind the push to get foreign language instruction started in elementary school.

The foundation wants to give grants to teachers doing innovative work and has set up an alumni database for solicitation efforts. As of this month, the district’s teachers can have money taken out of their paychecks to support the foundation.

He eventually wants to help fund a districtwide no-book/no-paper program. The object is to replace heavy textbooks that injure young spines with hand-held computer devices that download the information students need.

He said that if people pulled together through the foundation, they could accomplish wonders.

“Everyone can give something and get stimulated by a teacher, by a class, by a program, by a principal and come together,” he said.

Debbie Gatti, a North Rockland school board member, has been meeting with representatives of some of the county’s school foundations to see if such a program would be viable in her district.

She wants to start small, with an academic hall of fame in the vein of a sports hall of fame. It’s not something a cash-strapped district would put in its budget, and the project would require more time and money than a single person could contribute, she said.

“My hope is that eventually we can have maybe enough money to do some of the extra things that, because of financial constraints, you just can’t do,” she said. “I know in other places people use foundations to do extras like landscaping. We have some real immediate needs because of budget constrictions. As times get better, if we can do the niceties, that’s where it could eventually go.”

Copyright © The Journal News. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the Gannett Co., Inc.