Parents Pitch In to Help Texas Schools Face Budget Cuts Callie Richmond for The Texas Tribune Casis Elementary School pupils at an outdoor classroom designed, financed and built by volunteers. The space used to be a vacant field, sandwiched between Casis Elementary School and a parking lot. Now, thanks to diligent fund-raising and a parent who is an architect, it is a state-of-the-art outdoor classroom where pupils get lessons in subjects ranging from math to creative writing. There is an open-air "room" with long green tables and benches, rosemary-filled garden beds and a pond studded with lily pads. A small stone amphitheater nearby also serves as a large-scale sun dial. The outpouring that produced the classroom is part of a pattern in West Austin, where community members also pooled their resources when Casis's 60-year-old library needed new shelves - and when, down the road at O. Henry Middle School, the campus could not afford to hire the teachers it needed to maintain small class sizes after state budget cuts. Casis raised $90,000 to install new carpeting along with the library shelves. At O. Henry, parents have raised $350,000 in the past two years to finance seven new teaching positions. There is a long history of private philanthropy in public schools. But the elimination of more than $5 billion in state financing for public education in the last legislative session has put more pressure on parents to open their wallets. And while no one says that a community's support of its schools is a negative, the influx of private money concerns civil rights advocates who say it exacerbates existing inequities in the public school system. The smaller classes, better facilities and extracurricular activities financed with private dollars attract the best teachers and offer far more opportunity to students in affluent areas, said Jim Harrington, the director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. "It ends up creating a de facto two-tier system," he said. His organization, which recently released a report highlighting what it called the "vestiges of segregation" in the Austin Independent School District, has filed a lawsuit against a West Texas school district, arguing that its three high school campuses have wide variations in per-student financing. Mr. Harrington said he hoped the lawsuit would become a template for other parents around the country who are grappling with such disparities. Patty Martin, the principal of Casis, has a different hope: that what her school has done with the outdoor classroom will make it easier for other schools to do the same, especially now that the design is in place and a network of willing donors has been assembled. If that happens, the community may have to export some of the talent and resources that made the project a success at Casis. Burton Baldridge, the architect who designed the outdoor classroom, and whose children attend Casis, found an eager stable of patrons who donated concrete, steel and lumber. In August, Mr. Baldridge left his office every day at 4 p.m. to labor over the structure with three other volunteers, sometimes working late into the night. More people donated their time on weekends. Parents managed to raise about $30,000, and a local business put in a little more than that to cover the rest. But Mr. Baldridge said that figure represents just a fraction of the structure's total value when accounting for the donated services, materials and time. On a warm September afternoon, about 20 first graders filed out of the outdoor classroom into the nearby gardens. Their teacher had just dispatched them with the mission of identifying solids and liquids in their surroundings. Nearly all of the children headed straight for the pond. One boy bent over and tentatively stuck a finger in the water. Recoiling, he squealed, "There's a frog!"