Annual Funds as an Integral Part of Independent Schools, Including Ours

You would have to be completely off the grid for the last several months to have not heard from Emily and Reid Shackelford ’93, 2022-23 FWCD Fund Chairs and parents of Aidan ’22 and Lainey ’26, or one of their Fund team members. In their texts and calls and posts, the team might not have had time to share some of the bigger picture behind our annual fund. It’s the same picture that has been behind independent school annual funds for more than a century: the best educating takes more than tuition dollars.

You might be interested to know that FWCD does not have an annual fund because we cannot make an accurate budget. We speak of the “gap” between tuition and expenses knowing we could fill that gap by simply raising tuition. However, we will always be wary of raising tuition beyond what it takes to provide the best possible experiences for our students. As a school, we promise the highest level of learning opportunities. We meet that high-level promise first by hiring and keeping great teachers. Your tuition dollars go straight to those salaries. Beyond the all-important teacher salaries, though, we need to fund things like the faculty’s ongoing professional development. These expenses fall in that “gap.”

Our community members, faculty and staff, parents, grandparents, alums and Board members, alike, have contributed more than $1 million of those “gap” dollars each of the last four years. That dollar figure is truly amazing. Those funds go to so many of the difference-making essentials of an FWCD education. It’s hard to think of a more valuable role for annual fund dollars than allowing our faculty to be a part of learning opportunities, whether we are supporting master’s degrees and doctorates or we are sending someone to a conference, or we are providing teams of educators a professional development day out of the classroom to collaborate on longer-term planning. 

Every dollar you give to The FWCD Fund counts. Every participant counts. When we reach out to other sources to fundraise for larger projects, it is invaluable to be able to say we have phenomenal support from our parents, faculty and staff, whether they have given $50, $5,000 or $50,000. Already having raised more than $800,000 in the 2022-23 FWCD Fund, the Shacklefords are eager to meet their $1.2 million goal and do so with more than 80% parent and 90% faculty and staff participation. We hope you can help make the statement.