One School District holds out, another cashes in

As Port Washington-Saukville School District officials continue negotiations that have stretched for years with a company they hope will help pay for an $8 million overhaul of high school athletic fields, their colleagues in Grafton inked a $425,000 sponsorship deal with the same company this week.

The Grafton School Board on Monday approved a 25-year sponsorship agreement with Acuity that gives the Sheboygan insurance company naming rights for the high school’s older gym in exchange for the donation from its charitable foundation.

Grafton Supt. Jeff Nelson said the district will likely use the money to help pay for the first phase of its football field project. He said the district and Acuity have been in negotiations for about nine months.

Negotiations between Port Washington-Saukville school officials and Acuity date to at least 2016, and the fact that the district has not reached a sponsorship agreement with the company and that the only funding committed to the first phase of the athletic field project is public money has become a source of recent friction between the nonprofit foundation created to raise money for the district and district officials.

“A small group of our School District leaders spent three years over-complicating a very simple process and lost a comparable gift for our community,” Jennifer Clearwater, president of the PWSSD Foundation Inc., said Tuesday. “Do I hope that there’s an opportunity for us with Acuity in the future? Absolutely. Unfortunately, that opportunity may be many years from now.”

Jim Froemming, the district’s director of business services and a member of the foundation who has been involved in negotiations, reacted to news of the Grafton School District’s sponsorship deal by saying, “I think it’s wonderful Acuity wants to donate money to area schools and student programming, and it’s great Grafton has been able to agree on a sponsorship deal.”

Referring to the Port-Saukville School District, Froemming said, “We hope Acuity looks closer to home.” 

The friction between the foundation and school officials came to a head after a March 25 School Board meeting during which board members were told by school officials that the foundation had not yet raised money to contribute to the first phase of the Port Washington High School outdoor athletic facility project  — a $911,675 artificial turf football field that is to be completed in August. 

Board members questioned why the foundation was not prepared to contribute to a project that was supposed to be financed primarily with private donations, then voted 5-2 to proceed with the football field work. The project is to be paid for with $725,000 the district received from the sale of 54 acres on Port Washington’s west side and, at least for now, about $187,000 from the district’s fund balance. The expectation of school officials is that the foundation will reimburse the district the $187,000 when it raises enough money.

Briefed on the board’s vote after the meeting, Clearwater, a professional fundraiser who is director of philanthropy for Discovery World and serves on the PWSSD Foundation in a volunteer capacity, wrote in an email to both School Board and foundation members that she didn’t understand why the board was told the foundation did not have any money when she was led to believe by school officials that the foundation was sitting on $500,000 in donations — $400,000 from Acuity and another corporate donation of $100,000.

She said in an interview and wrote in an email to foundation members that school officials who are also members of the foundation have tightly controlled negotiations with Acuity and misled the foundation and School Board.

Froemming is a voting foundation director and Supt. Michael Weber and School Board President Brenda Fritsch are ex-officio members who do not have voting powers.

“Something is amiss,” Clearwater wrote in an April 3 email to foundation members. “I’m not suggesting that there has been intentionally nefarious behavior. All I know to date is that we are being mislead regarding the actions of the School Board pertaining to our efforts to raise funds on the district’s behalf, and the School Board is being misled as to the activities and fundraising progress of our foundation.”

In interviews, Froemming said school officials have not misled anyone. While an Acuity donation appeared to be forthcoming at one point during negotiations, it no longer is in the offing, he said.

Minutes of foundation meetings and emails between its members suggest district officials were negotiating a sponsorship agreement with Acuity similar to the one approved by the Grafton School Board this week.

Froemming, however, said that during School Board committee discussions about sponsorship of school facilities it became clear to officials the board was unlikely to approve a deal like the one Acuity was proposing, primarily because of the money it was offering for the naming rights it wanted. Rather than take a proposal to the board and risk a rejection that could jeopardize future negotiations, officials decided to continue talks with the company, he said.

“It was evident it wasn’t going to go through,” Froemming said of the odds the board would approve the sponsorship deal. “We decided we had more work to do. It (a no vote) could have threatened the process.”

Although talks between school officials and Acuity apparently continue, the company has chosen to pursue other sponsorship agreements, at least in the near future, Froemming said.

“They (Acuity) are saying the money is not available to us right now,” he said. “The hope is that they (Acuity) sees the value in our district and the details can be worked out. 

“We all wish this would have come together quicker, but the lesson is to be patient and good things will come.”

Clearwater, however, is calling for change. She has asked to be solely responsible for negotiating with Acuity and be allowed to present formal fundraising updates to the School Board.

She is also questioning whether the foundation “inadvertently created too much undue influence on our PWSSD Foundation efforts by allowing for both a voting district staff director and the ex-officio positions. Is that baked-in conflict of interest?”

Clearwater said the foundation’s executive committee agrees that the structure of the foundation needs to change, and one option under consideration is eliminating the positions held by school district officials.