Two Great Salt Bay Community School mothers and parent-teacher organization leaders have founded a nonprofit with a mission to enrich the education of GSB students.
Early this year, with a grassroots effort in the works to replace the school’s aging playground, Great Salt Bay parent-teacher organization co-presidents Jenny Mayher and Angela Russ brought the idea of a nonprofit forward.
A formal nonprofit would allow the leaders of the playground campaign to write grants and solicit tax-deductible donations, they said. It could do the same for the parent-teacher organization (PTO) and the sports boosters, essentially gathering all student support activities under the same administrative roof.
“We have the energy to do this right now because we really believe in this school and we really believe in this project,” Russ told the Great Salt Bay School Committee in February.
Mayher, a children’s librarian, Newcastle resident and mother of two GSB students, and Russ, a school nurse and mother of three who lives in Damariscotta, both cite the school as the key factor in their families’ decisions to move to the area.
“It’s the perfect size, for one thing,” Mayher said.
The K-8 school’s approximately 400 students make it big enough for strong art and music programs and a thriving athletics department, yet small enough for plenty of one-on-one instruction, Mayher said.
“It’s small enough that you really get personal attention,” she said. “There’s a small class size. You have a real personal relationship with your child’s teacher.”
The two mothers became good friends after meeting through their kids – their sons are best friends, they said – and their concern for the education of their children drives their activism on the behalf of all the school’s students.
The idea of a nonprofit affiliated with a public school “has been around for years,” Mayher said.
The organizations began to crop up about a decade ago in states that adopted the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which caps property taxes, the primary revenue source for schools like Great Salt Bay.
The Taxpayer Bill of Rights led to deep cuts in school budgets and the loss of academic and athletic programs, sparking a national movement among parent-teacher organizations to create nonprofits to try to save some of those programs.
“It’s useful to a public school to have a nonprofit that can raise funds outside of the school board-controlled funds,” Mayher said.
Mayher and Russ made the case for a nonprofit to the boosters, the parent-teacher organization and the school committee early this year.
Not all school leaders were immediately enthusiastic about the idea.
Jennifer MacDonald, a Damariscotta representative to the Great Salt Bay School Committee, said founding and running a nonprofit is a “tremendous burden” and said the committee, not a private organization, was responsible for the playground and other facilities.
MacDonald, an executive director of a healthcare nonprofit and a GSB mother, talked with Mayher and Russ after that February meeting and met with them for several hours the next week.
“She wanted to make sure that we were really ready for this,” Mayher said. “She wanted to push back and make sure we were going to see it through to the end.”
“She said, ‘I’ve done this twice. I can help you,'” Russ said.
MacDonald used an analogy to impress on the women the consequences of their decision. The decision to start a nonprofit, she said, was like a couple’s decision to have a baby, and would come with responsibilities they might not have anticipated, like regular reports to the Internal Revenue Service.
The warning did not sway Mayher and Russ, although they would continue to rely on MacDonald for advice and support throughout the process.
“We couldn’t have done it without her,” Mayher said.
The road toward nonprofit status was still full of challenges.
As “just a couple moms doing this on the side,” as Mayher describes herself and Russ, “There are things that we had no idea about,” Russ said.
The friends were able to take advantage of one another’s natural strengths to navigate the complex path to nonprofit status.
“I had no prior nonprofit experience,” Russ said. Mayher, as a member of the board of directors of a nonprofit theater company, had some.
“Some of our strengths are very different, so we complement each other really well and get stuff done,” Russ said.
Mayher has strong communication skills, Russ said, while Mayher is grateful for her friend’s efficiency in dispatching administrative tasks and handling the financial side of the work.
The two women did their research and enlisted the services of retired attorney Dan Pykett, a local man who volunteers with Score as a small business counselor.
“He was a great resource,” Mayher said.
The boosters and the PTO chipped in $500 apiece to cover the organization’s filing fees and on May 17, Friends of Great Salt Bay Inc., became a nonprofit corporation.
Mayher and Russ are the co-presidents of the nonprofit’s board of directors, as they are of the PTO.
The board also includes treasurer Dorothe Bailey, a local accountant; secretary Rebecca Tilden, a former president of the GSB parent-teacher organization; Great Salt Bay School Committee chairwoman and converted skeptic Jennifer MacDonald; former GSB Principal Dick Marchi and Paul Mathews, a family law magistrate.
Every member except Marchi, the principal of the school for 29 years, has at least one child currently enrolled at the school.
“I think it speaks really well of the organization that we have such a strong board,” Russ said. “I think it’s a vote of confidence.”
The young nonprofit, which consists, Mayher said, of a post office box and a file folder at Russ’ house, still has hurdles to overcome.
The board has to figure out how to cover administrative costs for things like insurance and the approximately $1500 in annual filing fees, and a decision will be made about whether to pursue a grant to pay a part-time executive director.
Mayher and Russ, meanwhile, continue to log long volunteer hours, sometimes as much as a 40-hour week of late nights and weekends juggling nonprofit paperwork and fundraising for the playground.
Already, though, they have established the foundation for an organization that, with hard work and nurturing, should expand learning opportunities available to GSB students for many years to come.
For example, the nonprofit might decide to hire a foreign language teacher, install artificial grass on the athletics fields or charter a late bus to transport students home from after-school activities.
Already, all of those projects and others have advocates within the community, Mayher and Russ said.
“It is as flexible as the next generation of parents and teachers want to make it, as long as it enhances the education of Great Salt Bay students,” Mayher said.
