April 28th, 2008
Gift to School Forces Debate Over Naming Rights Sales
By Doug Belden
TwinCities.com
Issue is new to St. Paul district; some see funding source, but critics say merit should trump
Shortly after the school year is over, workers will replace the vinyl gym floor at Central High School with a wooden surface.
The $100,000 project — which requires an additional $465,000 in related work — is not remarkable in a district that authorizes $15 million in capital projects each year.
What is noteworthy is that, for the first time in St. Paul Public Schools, for as long as anyone can remember, a donor will have his name attached to a project he funded.
The plan is to put up a plaque near the floor, saying it was provided by a generous donation from T. Denny Sanford, a Central alum.
The school board and superintendent have yet to figure out whether the project — which got the go-ahead this month — sets a lasting precedent, but it has opened the door for the state’s second-largest district to join the ranks of school systems nationwide that offer naming rights in return for gifts.
As long as the money doesn’t come with strings attached or require schools to compromise their mission, school board member Tom Goldstein said, he wouldn’t oppose to it.
“I guess I don’t see it as that controversial a thing if we went that direction,” he said, especially when districts are scrambling for new revenue sources. “We have real needs.”
But board chair Kazoua Kong-Thao said she would oppose offering naming rights to big donors.
“Our schools are public schools. It is for the public usage,” she said.
What happened at Central was an anomaly, Kong-Thao said, and she points out that new district procedures for naming areas within buildings — which the board is asking the superintendent to write but aren’t complete — should focus on soliciting community input, not courting wealthy benefactors.
Plenty of districts see it differently.
In Newburyport, Mass., for example, the local education foundation posts on its Web site a list of rooms available at the high school and the cost of naming rights for each. The prices range from $100,000 for an entire room such as the gymnasium to $300 for a seat in the auditorium.
Locally, other districts have struggled with the issue of how much of a presence to grant corporate donors in school environments.
Three years ago, Stillwater lifted its ban on advertising in schools so Cub Foods could put its logo on the high school gym floor, in return for about $50,000 from Cub. Several east metro districts allow businesses to advertise at athletics fields and in yearbooks.
In Anoka-Hennepin schools, the state’s biggest district, advertising in athletics facilities is prohibited, and the district does not offer naming rights to donors. To the south, Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan schools allow advertising on baseball field fences and the like, and there are some commercials on radio programs broadcast on its buses, but donors aren’t permitted to name school facilities, spokesman Tony Taschner said.
At the college level, the University of Minnesota regularly names facilities after large givers.
In 2003, Sanford, a wealthy South Dakota banker and a U alum, offered $35 million toward a new Gophers football stadium, but the deal fell through in part over a dispute about naming rights. Two years later, he got his name on the medical school at the University of South Dakota, in return for a $20 million donation.
In St. Paul, there has been a policy about naming school buildings and programs but nothing about naming areas within buildings, and Central simply took advantage of that opening, principal Mary Mackbee said.
“We didn’t think we were doing anything wrong,” she said.
The school’s booster club wrote to Sanford, asking for a donation for the gym floor and offering to name it for him, Mackbee said.
Back came a check for $100,000 from Sanford’s foundation, which touched off several months of difficult conversations for the school board — not so much about the naming issue but about whether the private donation should be allowed to push the gym work ahead of other projects that district staff and community members had ranked higher.
Last October, the board punted the problem to Superintendent Meria Carstarphen, who said she would try to find the $465,000 for the gym improvements from contingency funds. Earlier this month, she announced the work would be done with money left over from projects at Murray Junior High and the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center.
Mackbee emphasized that Sanford never made naming rights a condition of his gift. “The man never approached us. We approached him,” she said.
He already was a member of the school’s hall of fame and deserving of recognition for his achievements, separate from his status as a donor, she said. “He’s a wonderful story,” Mackbee said. “He gives so much back to the community.”
That may be true in this case, but activists who oppose excessive commercialism in schools and other public venues nationwide say districts should be wary of straying from the practice of simply naming facilities after those the community judges worthy of emulation.
“There’s an honorable tradition of naming public spaces after individuals based on their civic contributions,” said Robert Weissman, managing director of Washington, D.C.-based Commercial Alert. “That’s a tradition worth maintaining.”
St. Paul has followed this tradition for buildings — naming schools for Gordon Parks, Paul and Sheila Wellstone, Bruce Vento and others — as well as areas within buildings, honoring district employees Bill Dunn and Maria Lamb recently by naming portions of schools after them.
The problem with adding money to the equation, Weissman said, is “you’re establishing a different set of community values and sending a different message to kids.”