Could Entrepreneurship Give School District Boost It Needs?

With the San Bruno Park School District , it can be very difficult to imagine how the district is going to pull itself out of a financial hole.

Many seem to agree that the district may not be able to do much about the revenue it receives for the budget. As a basic aid district that gets its funding from the state based on local property taxes, San Bruno Park can only work with what it's got.

However, Art Schmidtt, the district's interim chief business officer, offered another perspective to the discussion at last week's special school board meeting by saying there might be another way: entrepreneurship. 

At his previous job as a business administrator for another school district, Schmidtt said, thinking of entrepreneurial ways to generate revenue for those schools helped raise $1.4 million a year.

The big question in San Bruno is: Can the same thing be done here?

A few years ago, when Schmidtt was the chief business official for the Shasta Unified High School District, the administration there heard that a nearby rancheria was unhappy with the company that provided maintenance to their buses.

With an entrepreneurial spirit in mind, they asked the rancheria if the school district could take over the maintenance of the buses with the goal being that the rancheria would get a better service and the district would make a profit.

The Shasta school district eventually got a contract for the maintenance of all the rancheria's buses, Schmidtt said.

Morever, the school district began selling fuel and repairing buses for other school districts in the area, which were smaller.

The district also began offering its technology and food services to other agencies. They even began selling their own brand of pizza and got a federal trademark for it, Schmidtt said.

All of those efforts were possible, he said, because they had a top-notch staff and were willing to take advantage of opportunities when they became available.

When asked whether San Bruno Park had ever considered taking on entrepreneurial ideas to generate more revenue for the district, Superintendent David Hutt said steps have been taken.

The has been offered as a regional technology center and has had Foothill College offer community college courses. But Hutt said getting the Danford Center to generate a significant amount of revenue for the district would take more marketing.

"Currently, we're not staffed adequately to address those kinds of things," Hutt said.

The school district has also reached out to other districts nearby to see if they would be interested in sharing services to save money. This has been the case as the district has been searching for a new chief business officer and special education director, Hutt said.

But the offers made so far wouldn't work for the district, he said.

"There are a lot of reasonable ideas," he said. "But everyone involved in the idea would have to see it as being beneficial. Otherwise, it could be a good idea, but it doesn't fit."

Schmidtt said that his former school district found a lot of favor with its ideas, but they may not work everywhere.

They are examples, however, of how school districts could think more out of the box in difficult economic times.

"As we saw an opportunity, we pursued it," Schmidtt said. "Did we get every opportunity? No. But at least people knew we were out there."

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