No Gates grant for Omaha schools

The requirement to raise more than $65 million from the Omaha community has led the Omaha Public Schools to withdraw a grant application from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“This is a grim business decision,” Superintendent John Mackiel told The World-Herald this morning. “If we continue to participate, we knowingly would be responsible and we would not be able to complete the task.”"

The district, with the help and encouragement of the Seattle-based foundation, developed a five-year, $115 million plan to drastically revamp the way its 3,500 teachers are paid and trained. The goal was to improve student achievement in part by tying performance to teacher pay.

OPS requested $87 million from the foundation over five years, with the district making up the $28 million difference.

In mid-August, the district learned it was a finalist for major funding.

But in mid-October, the foundation told the district that it would, at most, receive $50 million over seven years, most of it coming in the last few years of the plan.

In turn, OPS would need to come up with more than double its original commitment — about $65 million.

Given the district's current financial state, OPS officials, the school board and the teachers union agreed to withdraw their application.

“We would have been irresponsible” to accept the grant and not meet its terms, said Sandra Jensen, school board president. “We were not going to let our children or families and our teachers down.”

A foundation official familiar with the OPS proposal could not be reached for comment this morning.

When the district applied for the grant in late July, it requested the plan “be accepted or rejected in its entirety.”

Mackiel, Jensen and Omaha teachers union President Doreen Jankovich said scaling back the funding now would result in a “half-baked pilot” program, which the foundation says it wants to avoid.

If fully funded, the grant would have provided seed money to establish a system of more training, more mentoring and a new pay system for all OPS full-time teachers.

Scaling back the grant, Mackiel said, would have created a program with bits and pieces of the plan, not the fully coordinated approach that was designed.

“It wouldn't work,” he said.

The grant would have given the district the funding to absorb changes in teacher pay within its budget.

The plan would have substantially boosted starting teacher pay (currently $32,282); created a more thorough review process for all teachers in their first three years; pair every teacher with a “master educator” mentor; and tied teacher raises to student performance, rather than experience.

“We believe in the integrity of the plan,” Jankovich said. “We want to do this correctly.”

Jankovich and others involved in the plan said they will continue to seek outside funding — particularly from federal programs focused on teacher pay.

More than three years ago, the district started an effort to revamp teacher pay. As the economy began to sour, the district and teachers union talked with the business community about helping to fund the idea. Economic conditions led to a lukewarm reception and not enough commitments to move ahead.

Knowing that, and the multimillion-dollar commitments already made to students through Building Bright Futures, the city's benefactors probably can't come up with $65 million, Mackiel said.

The foundation has Omaha ties. Investor Warren Buffett has pledged to donate most of his wealth to it and each year contributes more than $1 billion. He is a trustee of the foundation, and Bill Gates is a director of Buffett's investment company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Jeff Raikes, an Ashland, Neb., native and former Microsoft executive, was named the foundation's CEO last year.

Contact the writer:

444-1037, michaela.saunders@owh.com