For Immediate Release

March 1, 2011

Love Your Neighborhood School.

To Preempt Teacher Layoffs and Cuts in Enrichment,

Biviano Launches Directory to Easily Contribute Online

and Raise Awareness That It Takes a Village...

Brooklyn, NY -- Former New York State Assembly Candidate and P.S. 8 parent Doug Biviano is leading the charge to ensure that no child is left behind.  "Our PTA is ramping up fundraising efforts to maintain the caliber of school our community has built over the past decade.  To meet this goal --  by doubling our annual fundraising efforts to $500,000 -- we must think outside the parent body box and encourage all in the community to take a greater stake in ownership of our schools' successes by contributing and aggressively teaching friends to emulate."

He continued, "This investment in our future goes far beyond the P.S. community and what is thought of as normal.  Read more ...

Even in good times, PTAs from schools everywhere raise at ton of money.  Don't be fooled by all the 'Budget Cut' rhetoric in Albany and City Hall these days that this is something new.  We need only raise more and facilitate participation in a much broader way going forward."  To temper our resolve, Biviano reminds us that the main difference is everyone sustaining a greater individual effort rather than relying on the tax man.

To this end, Biviano offers the following tools on his website:

1. A one-stop "Love Your School" PTA fundraising directory -- http://bivforbrooklyn.com/schools with direct links to credit card contribution web pages for all school PTAs who ask, including their instructions for donations by check (to participate click here).
2. Instruction for school PTAs to start taking online Credit Card donations at www.nycharities.org if they are not yet able to do so.
3. Instruction for school PTAs to find FREE proven donors in their own neighborhoods who would be happy to help via campaign disclosure websites of their elected officials and other candidates.  Elected officials should feel the pinch as much as our children do.
4. Tips for Dialing for Dollars, Donor Development and, for the more technical savvy, FREE Joomla CMS/CiviCRM/php APIs web platforms and scripts to automate and manage efforts including the farming of phone numbers from political donor lists.

Biviano calls upon all press outlets to raise awareness and facilitate this effort by publishing and broadcasting stories on this matter utilizing all media and social media formats available to them.

Biviano further calls upon all elected officials to do the same by linking our "Love Your School" Directory to their websites and sharing in every newsletter they mail, email or tweet with our tax dollars and contributing from their campaign committees a s an opportunity to show leadership.  Why not even call the press for interviews or go on a district wide tour asking and educating constituents how to snowball this cause like it's a new voting machine?

Biviano sounded the obvious, "Elected officials should be doing everything they can to protect our students and our teachers from layoffs.  This includes lawmakers and executives actively and routinely doing what they do best, fundraising, but for their neighborhood schools instead of just themselves.  It also means, with great urgency, investigating, evaluating and eliminating other layers of waste within our school system such as vestiges of years gone by like School Districting that serves more as barriers to students, the insanity of spending over $50 million annually on high stakes testing and untold millions more on 'all-over-the-place' school grading schemes when we already know the most significant problems we face like class size and poverty, and the outlandish spending and salaries within the DOE itself, outside of the classrooms, much of it to implement testing, grading and school closings."

With a deeper contextual eye on our children's economic security as teacher layoffs per school spreadsheets are revealed, Biviano offers a time for the UFT and the Mayor to stop blaming each other and, alternatively, to convene serious budget conversations -- in the spirit of President Eisenhower's farewell address and Dr. Martin Luther King's "A Time to Break Silence" speech -- that Labor, city and state executives, union bosses, mayors and governors alike, demand of President Obama and Congress to end the trillion dollar wars and extreme military spending so that we can instead fund our neighborhood schools.  "Not one, I repeat, NOT ONE TEACHER, in fact, NOT ONE SINGLE PUBLIC SERVICE EMPLOYEE NATIONWIDE would need to be laid off if President Obama decided tomorrow to listen to his people over his generals and returned our tax dollars to our states and our cities.  If we learn anything from the citizen action in Egypt to Libya to Wisconsin, it is that when people make their demands heard in their public squares, democracy is possible and national priorities can be realigned.  These are not new struggles.  They are the same old struggles being exploited every generation, wrapped in a fresh coat of rhetoric, economic crises and fear.  NOW is the time to break silence.  NOW is the time for courage."  ended Biviano.

Follow up press releases and emails will be sent out as the directory builds to reach all of New York City and New York States schools in every neighborhood.

Press Contact:   Doug Biviano, PS 8 Parent of Three, 917-257-3652

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