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Fortune Magazine on YES Prep

October 01, 2010 by Jeremy Jones

Fortune Magazine Online's article, "Forget Superman, charter schools are waiting for Oprah" highlights YES Prep's perspective on how the documentary, Waiting for Superman, should affect our fundraising efforts for this year. As a high-performing charter school, YES Prep believes that those who see the film will want to invest in education. And there is no better school to donate to than YES Prep!

Excerpts from the FORTUNE article: READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

"While we are only just approaching October, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas for the charter school movement. Since the documentary Waiting for Superman opened in select theaters last week, a cast of notables have announced a cascade of donations and investment pledges for charters, and it looks it's just the beginning of this holiday season.

The documentary, which highlights the myriad challenges of the national public education system, focuses on a handful of charter schools that have been able to educate (and graduate) students who have been largely written off by much of the system. The film pits the most successful of charter schools against the least successful traditional public schools, positioning the unions as the single largest impediment to effective school reform. It is, in other words, a commercial for charter schools with immensely high production values.

And the commercial is working.

Last Friday, Oprah Winfrey devoted her show to school reform, featuring Waiting for Superman and its director, Davis Guggenheim. She also announced that her Angel Network would donate $6 million to six charter school organizations..."

"And charter schools across the country have organized with Paramount Pictures to schedule screenings over the next couple of weeks, both to rally their current base of donors and to attract new ones.

"We'll be doing a pre-screening for our staff. We'll be inviting our core donors to come, people who've been involved in the investment at a significant level," says Jill Willis, spokesperson for the YES Prep Public Schools, a charter school network based in Houston and one of the six schools to receive a $1 million grant from Oprah Winfrey's Angel Network."

"While every state has its own funding approach toward charter schools, most charter organizations need to raise private funds to support facilities maintenance and to come up with the capital to expand and build new schools.

According to Ryan Dolibois, chief development officer at YES Prep, 80-85% of the school system's operating budget comes from public funding, leaving the remainder to be raised from private sources, such as the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation and individual donors.

'This year, we have a $42 million budget. We'll need to raise somewhere around $12 million,' says Dolibois.

YES has already raised $8 million toward this goal and expects a significant uptick in individual donations this year.

'Last year, we raised $1.5 million in individual donations. Building on the momentum of the 'Oprah Effect' and the documentary, we hope to grow individual gifts by 50-80%,' says Jill Willis, spokesperson for YES.

Like several of the schools featured in Waiting for Superman, the YES schools have an extended 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. school day, a longer school year, and teachers that are on call to work with students on evenings and weekends."

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