People

Education Advocate

AEF's Brooke Briggance Rides to the Rescue of Alameda Schools

    Sitting behind a cluttered desk inside the small office of the Alameda Education Foundation, Brook Briggance looks like a teacher correcting papers. Her curly brown hair hangs down as she stares at a laptop computer. Casually dressed in jeans and a jacket, she’s warm and engaging as she greets her visitor.
    Even though Briggance isn’t a teacher, she’s great at explaining school education funding in California, which she’s been learning a lot about lately, including that the current state funding formula per pupil puts Alameda schools dead last of the 17 Alameda County school districts.
    Briggance came to AEF in a serendipitous way. Since her kids have been in the schools for eight years, she and her husband, Bram, a management consultant, had been involved in PTAs. But the idea of actually working for the foundation didn’t come up until the Briggances helped AEF’s board at a strategic planning retreat in July 2007.
    “While I was there that day, I got a bird’s-eye view on AEF’s priorities and strategies,” Briggance says. “[Executive Director] Kris Murray resigned the day I was there. And when some board members talked to me about the executive director position, I realized that what I had was a good match for what they needed.”
    The September 2007 timing was perfect. She’d been looking for work and had recent work experience running the Twin Towers Church education programs.
    But Briggance had to hit the ground running. In January, the state announced a $10 billion budget deficit. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to cut 10 percent from the state’s education budget to help reduce spending, and the school board had to cut $4.5 million from its 2008-09 budget.
    AUSD superintendent Ardella Dailey said the proposed cuts—no more sports teams, larger ninth-grade classes, no more kindergarten through third-grade music programs, teacher layoffs, closure of two high school/community pools—were drastic but necessary to balance the district’s budget.
    “It was a very different job in January than it was in September,” says Briggance.
    She felt compelled to act. Briggance organized several AEF summits, assembling school district officials and board members, teachers, staff, PTA members, city council members and parents. “I told them, ‘I want to know everything you can think of to raise revenue,’ ” she says.
    They came up with a 20-item list of ideas, including funding reform for schools, possible legal action and requiring the state to fully fund state-mandated programs such as special education. But community education and awareness of the school district’s budget crisis emerged as the top priority, so she began making the rounds of community organizations and groups.
    “That’s when we decided to launch the ad campaign,” she says.
    But before Briggance launched AEF’s planned “Step Up and Donate” ad campaign, Encinal High School students took matters into their own hands. Following the school board’s vote to approve the proposed cuts, hundreds walked out of classes the next day, garnering local and national media coverage.
    And although she didn’t plan the walkout, Briggance had a direct connection: Her oldest son, Ian Merrifield, Encinal’s student body president, was one of the protest’s leaders. “I was so damn proud,” she says.
    The protest also attracted Sacramento’s attention, including Gov. Schwarzenegger’s and state superintendent of public instruction Jack O’Connell’s, and put a human face to the statewide education cuts and extra pressure on the school board.
    Even though a school parcel tax already existed, the AUSD board felt obligated to put another parcel tax, Measure H, on the June 3 ballot to try and avert the budget crisis. At press time, Measure H was believed to have narrowly passed largely because of Briggance’s efforts.
    The AEF board endorsed Measure H because it knew the foundation couldn’t raise $4.5 million by the fall, so passing it became Briggance’s main focus. “If the house is on fire, you need to put it out, not let it burn. Get the hose,” she says.
    The two simultaneous campaigns led to some confusion about their relationship and some criticism of Briggance. She’s worked on the Measure H campaign as well as AEF’s, but states the two campaigns are separate efforts and had no financial ties.
    “By law, nonprofit organizations such as AEF are restricted from financially supporting political campaigns or endorsing candidates, but it is perfectly legal for a foundation to endorse a ballot measure,” she says.
    The AEF campaign, “Step Up and Donate,” with its main slogan, “Public education is too valuable to throw away,” hit the streets with a bang in early spring with more than 300 volunteers putting up and distributing 3,000 lawn signs while teachers and students climbed into trash cans plastered with AEF campaign stickers. Playing off the students’ protest, it received more local and national media attention.
    Briggance was able to kick the campaign into high gear because it had been in the works since 2007, thanks to Briggance’s predecessor, Kris Murray, and a Franklin school parent, Kevin Lee, who owns the Oakland advertising agency, Wrecking Ball, which donated the campaign’s $80,000 design costs.
    Lee praises Briggance’s hard work and quick launch, which included obtaining city and school district approval. “I saw her under pressure the entire time, and she held up mostly with a smile,” says Lee in an e-mail.
    At the same time, Briggance understood AEF had to become media savvy, so she initiated a redesigned AEF Web site, a blog and newsletter. She characterizes the AEF campaign as a success, mainly for catching the attention of corporate sponsors such as the Oakland Raiders, elected officials and local organizations that want to support quality public schools in Alameda.
    Founded in the aftermath of Proposition 13 in 1982, as were many of the 600-plus education foundations in California, AEF has provided direct support for classroom and arts programs for 25 years through donations, memberships, gala fundraisers and its Adopt-a-Classroom program. Former AEF board president Judy Blank served as its defacto volunteer executive director until 2005 when the board hired an executive director to set up policies and procedures, acquire small grants and move away from all volunteers.
    Briggance has drawn up a strategic plan for AEF and hired a development director to go after larger sums of money in a more systematic way and transform the foundation from an event-driven culture to a professional fundraising organization. She has commissioned an external audit, which, once completed, along with an annual report, will allow the AEF to compete for large corporate and foundation grants. In 2005-06, AEF contributed almost $400,000 to Alameda’s schools through, but it will give much more in the future if Briggance gets her way.
    “When education foundations are working well, they’re taking the stressors off of the school district,” she says. AEF’s seven main targets for fundraising include teacher support, after-school enrichment classes, athletics, the arts, classroom innovation and technology, going green at all schools and environmentally sound schools.
    “I can’t touch special education or math, but I can work on these seven things which are always on the chopping block. The more you take them offline, the more you secure them. You can also approach things sideways sometimes. Maybe you don’t need an art teacher but an artist-in-residence,” she says.
    Briggance has brought lots of welcome changes, says AEF’s board president, Anne DeBardeleben, who wholeheartedly supports her. “The budget crisis jump-started where she was going to be a year from now to right now,” she says “Brooke’s helping the foundation grow, in advocacy, grant writing and visibility.”
    Blank agrees Briggance has done a tremendous job. “She’s got great leadership skills and communicates well. The idea of the summit was a wonderful one. It made the foundation a leader.”
    Briggance, 38, originally came to Alameda in 1999 because of her own education. Accepted into a joint master’s program in comparative religion at the Graduate Theological Union and UC Berkeley, she was a graduate student with two kids and a cat, looking for housing and good schools for her kids.
    “I couldn’t find anything. A woman in the school’s office said, ‘I live in Alameda and it’s really nice. The schools are good, too. You won’t find a bad one.’ And she was right,” says Briggance.
    All of her children attend Alameda public schools, and she’s committed to keeping the quality of Alameda’s education excellent and equitable. Her son, Ian, the student leader, will attend Harvard in September.
    In addition to her AEF duties, Briggance continues work on her master’s degree and takes care of her three kids: Ian; Benjamin, 13, an eighth-grader at Chipman; and Elijah, 5, a preschooler.
    Briggance believes Alamedans have a moral obligation to educate all children equally and is proud to work for an organization that supports the 10,000 students in Alameda’s public schools, and says, “That’s what gets me up in the morning.”
 

—By Keith Gleason

—Photography by Craig Merrill