Boo Agee
Public schools aren’t created equal. Neither is their funding. Charlottesville’s new citywide PTO aims to even out those highs and lows.
“Our school parents are just spread pretty thin,” says Emily Harding, a PTO leader at Summit Elementary. Recent redistricting means Summit’s pupils come from newly housing-dense neighborhoods, but the school’s funding hasn’t kept up with that surge in students. And with parents often facing food insecurity, employment struggles, or language barriers, “our PTO does not have the same bandwidth as even the next closest school,” Harding says.
“We were raising around $4,000 a year, and there was another school in town raising upwards of 20,” she says. “What you can do for your teachers, or what you can do to help with field trips or school supplies, it’s gravely different between the schools.”
The City-wide PTO Fund, relaunched for the 2025-2026 school year after a yearlong pandemic-era pilot, pools donations from across Charlottesville, then parcels out funds based on how each school’s number of economically disadvantaged pupils differs from the city’s average. It supplements, not replaces, what’s raised by the schools’ existing PTOs. And it provides a convenient one-stop donation spot for companies and organizations that might otherwise juggle multiple contributions to different schools.
The fund’s first disbursement of around $20,000 in February 2026 included more than $2,700 for Summit. That’s helping to fund snacks for hungry kids, buses for field trips, and supplies for teachers.
“A teacher just came in asking for microscopes for her fourth graders, mainly in preparation for next year,” Harding says. “We got them today. We dropped them off immediately. And I mean, she cried.”—NA Sunrise Elementary students put in the miles for the Walkathon, its PTO’s biggest fundraiser of the year.
