Style Weekly, continues the conversation on the “Gang of 26″ this week with an article about Richmond City School’s non-profit organization the the RPS Education Foundation. The Near West End News wrote about it 2 weeks ago, and the controversy keeps coming.
Although it is not an opinion piece, the story points out that this basically inactive organization would be the perfect venue for the business leaders to contribute some money to RPS while still maintaining some control over how the money is spent by sitting on the board.
Can the quagmire and red tape of RPS be avoided by going through this organization? Only time will tell.
Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Since the inception of the Richmond Public Schools Education Foundation six years ago, the nonprofit organization has done next to nothing.

The Richmond School Board established the foundation to open a spigot for private money to enter public schools and got its first corporate pledge of $100,000 from Verizon in 2002.

Since then, the foundation has lost nearly all its steam. Until 2005, it quietly provided an outlet for small-time private donors and a few much-smaller corporate donations. Then it faded.

By next month, the Richmond School Board hopes to reignite the foundation, acknowledging that the dormant organization is tailor-made to give Richmond business leaders the ability to work with the School Board and even help steer its policy decisions.

The push comes just weeks after a group of 26 local business leaders called for a radical switch from a popularly elected school board to one that’s appointed by Mayor L. Douglas Wilder and City Council. They proposed the change as the best way to begin addressing what some business leaders consider a grossly mismanaged school system.

The foundation could partially answer that complaint, School Board Vice-Chairwoman Lisa Dawson says. Dawson, School Board Chairman George Braxton and Superintendent Deborah Jewell-Sherman are the three remaining foundation board members. Its six other members were dismissed by the School Board last year.