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NYC's school PTA fundraising gap is growing, mirroring broader racial disparities

Joe Hong

Published Nov 2, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. ET

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Joe Hong

Published Nov 2, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. ET

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Parent teacher associations may conjure images of read-a-thons and fun runs, where grandparents and relatives pledge to pay their grade schooler for every page they read or lap they jog. And of course, there’s the iconic PTA bake sale.

But in New York City, PTA fundraising efforts vary from hawking homemade muffins and pastries for a few hundred dollars to running sophisticated, self-sustaining nonprofits that operate like small businesses and take in millions in revenue.

P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, raised about $2 million in donations and revenue, more than any other school last year, according to data from the Department of Education. In second place was P.S. 158 on Manhattan's Upper East Side, which raised $1.7 million. Both schools enroll between 600 and 700 students. New Explorations into Science, Technology & Math, a K-12 school on the Lower East Side, which enrolls about 1,600 students, came in third, raising $1.4 million.

Each school in the city is required to have a parent association. In total, they reported nearly $70 million in revenue and savings in the 2024-25 academic year, which helped their schools pay for beneficial after-school enrichment programs, field trips, support staff and in some cases even building maintenance.

“We find evidence that PTA money above and beyond any public resources actually do boost achievement in reading and math,” said Brittany Murray, an education professor at Davidson College who researches PTAs. “But it tends to help those that are more affluent.”

PTAs in many of the city’s low-income neighborhoods are far less flush with cash, with some parent groups reporting donations of just a few hundred dollars or nothing at all. A comparison with demographic data reveals sharp racial disparities in which students benefit the most from parent fundraising that have only grown since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year, schools serving more white students outraised those that primarily serve Black children 5-to-1.

The findings come as the Mamdani administration is under increased pressure to address segregation and inequality in the city’s education system.

On the whole, PTA funds ultimately made up a small amount compared to the city education department's overall $41 billion budget. And the city makes an effort to offset the detrimental effects of poverty on education by providing other sources of money for schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.

Nicole Brownstein, a spokesperson for New York City Public Schools, pointed to the city’s Fair Student Funding formula, which channels more money to schools with large concentrations of poverty, students with disabilities and English learners. The city also provides money for these schools to expand arts education.

“We recognize that funding capacity reflects differences in community resources and fundraising capacity – that is why we are consistently working to strengthen our Fair Student Funding formula, meeting schools and students where they are,” she said.

But experts in education policy say even that additional money is not enough, and that while PTA fundraising is a lifeline for many schools, the wide gaps in fundraising can worsen inequality and are yet another symptom of a segregated school system that has come under fresh scrutiny since the start of the school year. Last month, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones detailed her daughter’s experience with inequality and segregation in the city’s school system, renewing calls to address long-standing disparities.

“When you have places that are highly economically segregated and racially segregated, then you're gonna see vast differences in the schools that can fundraise,” said Murray. “It exacerbates inequality.”

Anita Baier, a PTA president at P.S. 8 in Brooklyn Heights, said PTAs do more than fundraising. She said they play an essential role in planning events for families and connecting parents within the community But she said much of their work is unfortunately focused on raising money to pay for necessities the city does not provide, like after-school programs and support staff.

“Not only do we need more funding, we need predictable and adequate funding year over year so parents are not always having to be on alert and step up to plug these gaps,” Baier said.

Racial and geographic disparities

The five boroughs are home to more than 1,200 parent associations. And yet just 15 PTAs accounted for a third of the $70 million raised and saved by parent associations last year. Those in Manhattan had the highest average revenues last year, over $200,000. But the top funded parent groups were scattered across both Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn.

Gothamist used PTA financial data and student demographic data from the Department of Education to calculate how much a typical student, depending on their race, benefits from PTA fundraising. The average white student in the 2024-25 school year benefited from$254 in PTA money. For the average Black student, the amount was just $46.30. Of the 15 schools that raised more than $1 million, only two have Black enrollment above 4%.

Take P.S. 8 in Brooklyn Heights, where 69% of enrollment was white and 3% was Black over the course of the last school year. Only 1-in-8 students at the elementary school came from low-income households, compared to a citywide average of nearly 3-in-4 students. The school raised $1.3 million and ended the year with $844,000 in the bank after expenses.

At the top earning school, P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill, 69% of grade schoolers were white. According to the education department’s data, the school had just six Black students, and 13% of pupils overall came from low-income households. Out of the $2 million the school raised in total, it ended the 2024-25 year with over $1.1 million after expenses.

Contrast that with P.S. 399 in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, where 66% of students are Black, and P.S. 43 in the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood, where 78% of students are Latino. Over 95% of students at both schools come from low-income households, among the highest concentrations of poverty in the city. Their PTAs each raised less than $1,000 last year.

None of the parents at the school’s parent association, or those at several other low-fundraising PTAs, responded to requests for interviews.

Claire Mackevicius, an education professor at the University of Oregon who researches parent teacher associations across the country, said affluent parents are often blamed for those wide fundraising disparities. But she said they’re merely plugging holes in school systems that are struggling to provide enrichment programs, pay for tutoring and keep class sizes down.

“ I want to be clear that sort of onus and burden is not on the committed and hardworking volunteers in the PTA organization itself,” Mackevicius said. “Our public schools are underfunded, full stop.”

She said the chasm between rich and poor PTAs is instead a reflection of broader disparities, and that elected officials and policymakers have grown complacent about inequality and segregation in schools. By some measures, school segregation in the city has worsened since the 1990s, with students of color more likely today to be attending a school with fewer white students.

Murray, the Davidson College professor, said segregation has worsened in part because New York City’s parents can choose to send their children to middle and high schools outside of their neighborhoods. And a PTA that raises more money is another factor that makes certain schools more attractive than others in the eyes of some parents.

“It's this kind of circular problem,” she said. “It’s really hard to disentangle the segregation piece and the school choice piece.”

How PTAs spend

The Department of Education’s rules for PTAs, known as Regulation A-660, allow parent fundraising to support a variety of personnel and services at schools. PTAs can pay for specialized, supplemental teachers who rotate into different classrooms throughout the school day, or staff who work during after-school or weekend programs. This includes academic support like tutoring or homework help, as well as enrichment and extracurricular activities, such as science and math clubs or art classes.

After-school programs are a big component of what some PTAs provide, and some parent associations hire a staff member to oversee those services. That might mean managing a contract with a company that provides art, music or dance lessons.

What PTAs can’t do is cover classroom teachers for core subjects like math, science, English and history.

New York City Public Schools does not collect and publish detailed data on how PTAs spend their money. But a review of some tax filings show that many of the PTAs that raise hundreds of thousands of dollars each year generate revenues by collecting fees from families attending after-school programs. Most of those revenues typically go back into staffing those programs.

According to tax filings for P.S. 8’s PTA, the organization spent $526,000 in 2024-25 on its after-school program, including $146,000 for the program’s staff salaries. Other costs included paying third-party vendors who come with their own staff and curriculum, according to PTA Co-President Amélie Walker-Yung. The fees collected from families for after-school and extracurricular programs and clubs amounted to $991,000.

Walker-Yung said the after-school program regularly changes its offerings based on what parents and students want. Clubs and activities range from chess and STEM-based programs to drama, dance and sports. She said her son is currently taking a comic-book drawing class.

Gothamist’s analysis found a $200 difference on average in how white students benefit from PTA fundraising compared to Black students.

“ It doesn't sound like much,” Murray said, but it can be spent in “highly impactful” ways. A field trip or an after-school program that fosters an interest in science or technology can pay off in the long run, she said.

“ When you accumulate that across the whole school, that can make a big difference,” she said. “Whether it's supplies, whether it's grants for teachers, whether it's field trips, that goes a long way across a school building.”

Her research shows that the PTAs that raise enough money to afford additional programs and activities are most likely to be in white, affluent neighborhoods.

P.S. 29’s PTA in Cobble Hill spent $1.6 million on its after-school program, which included $700,000 for staff. Additional money went to staff training, supplies and insurance. The program in turn raised $1.5 million in fees, according to tax filings. Some of the instructors in the after-school classes are also classroom teachers at the school. The PTA also covers training for teachers in the program.

After-school offerings at P.S. 29 change periodically, said Kasey Noziska, one of the school’s PTA presidents. Students have taken classes in cooking, fashion design and understanding the stock market. Parents pay from $25 to over $100 per session, depending on whether the class needs extra materials or equipment, which is a bargain compared to private school programs in the area. Noziska said the PTA offers financial assistance for families who can’t afford it.

In addition to academic and artistic enrichment, the after-school programs fulfill a more basic parental necessity: childcare.

“It started because there was a huge need for childcare after school, and there weren’t many affordable options,” said Noziska. “And there wasn’t a real diversity of options catering to children’s interests.”

For schools without PTA-funded after-school programs, the city operates 900 free programs across the five boroughs.

PTA tax filings for some schools include more detail than others: P.S. 158’s PTA on the Upper East Side spent $39,000 on a fifth grade trip and $10,600 on the school yearbook. Records also show the PTA supported a “photo day” to the tune of $5,900.

Other PTA tax filings are more vague. Take Stuyvesant High School, the highly selective high school that integration advocates criticized for admitting just three Black students this school year. Its PTA provided $841,253 in grants to the school for “additional funding for various departments, educational & extracurricular programs” while also earning $32,000 in “investment income.” What those investments were are not detailed in the association’s tax forms and PTA leaders at Stuyvesant High did not respond to emailed questions about either of these amounts.

PTA funding vs. public funding

Hannah-Jones’ New York Times magazine article about her family’s experiences with school segregation and disparate educational outcomes in Brooklyn has reignited calls to fix what advocates say is a broken system.

Education policy experts have urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on expanding free childcare, to propose a more robust plan for addressing systemic inequality and increasing funding for the city’s public schools.

PTA fundraising dollars make up a fraction of the overall amount of money received from local, state and federal sources. On average, the city already spends roughly $35,000 each year per student, according to education department data, far more than other large school districts, with the bulk of that funding coming from city coffers. It’s an increase of about 34% from pre-COVID 19 pandemic levels. Nearly 40% of that budget is spent on K through 12 education. Another third or so goes to employee benefits and pensions, along with debt payments.

The Department of Education gives each school the same amount per pupil, but then adds supplemental funding that depends on a student’s grade level, academic need and household income.

At P.S. 29 in Brooklyn, where the PTA raised $2,886 per student during the last school year, the school received about $17,000 per pupil in public funding.

But at P.S. 307, the elementary school where Hannah-Jones enrolled her daughter in 2014, the funding sources are essentially flipped. It received $42,000 in public, per-pupil funding in 2024-25. The school’s student body is 46% Black, 35% Latino and 10% white. About 85% of students come from low-income households. The school’s PTA did not report any fundraising income in 2024-25.

And at P.S. 44 in the Bronx, the PTA raised just $332 in total last year, less than $2 per pupil. It was among the lowest of PTAs that reported at least some income. A third of the students are Black, 67% are Latino and nearly all students come from low-income households. The school received $35,000 in per pupil funding from the city, state and federal governments.

Both P.S. 307 and P.S. 44 benefit from additional city funding that goes to schools serving more students from low-income households. They also get additional federal dollars, known as Title I money, allocated to schools serving high-poverty communities. The funding is designed to pay for extra teachers, additional curriculum and after-school tutoring to help counteract the ways poverty can prevent students from doing well in school.

Some parents at high-fundraising PTAs say differences in public spending make PTA fundraising necessary to provide critical parts of a “well-rounded education.”

“We’re not a Title I school, so we get significantly less money from DOE,” said Noziska at P.S. 29. “There are a lot of things necessary for our children, like arts, that DOE does not provide enough for us to fund.”

But Murray, the Davidson College professor, urged caution when drawing comparisons between PTA fundraising for schools in more affluent neighborhoods and extra city and federal support for schools in low-income neighborhoods designed to level the playing field.

“I don’t think that takes into account just how much it costs to educate a student that is poor,” she said. “Money matters, especially for students with the greatest needs.”

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Joe Hong

Joe Hong is the investigative data reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. He previously covered K-12 education for several newsrooms across California. His reporting has led to local reforms in juvenile justice system as well as a state law requiring universal screening for dyslexia. Got a tip? Email [email protected]

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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