Dec. 23—ROCHESTER — This week’s announcement that

Mayo Clinic would be donating $10 million to Rochester Public Schools

was the culmination of the district’s work to find alternative funding resources and also an ask from RPS Superintendent Kent Pekel.

The district’s administration has had an ongoing conversation with Mayo Clinic since Pekel came to Rochester, which meant the line of communication was already open when the school district announced it would have to make

some even deeper cuts than it already had

.

“When the redesign was announced, those discussions took on a different level of urgency,” Pekel said. “Mayo said ‘We’re very concerned. Tell us what’s going on.’ And I asked.”

After the

failure of a November referendum

that would have given the district $10 million a year for 10 years, RPS was facing a difficult prospect: closing multiple schools and making major changes to other programs.

Enter Mayo Clinic.

The two organizations have joined forces in many ways in the past, ranging from coordinating with one another during the COVID-19 pandemic to Mayo collaborating on various educational programs for RPS students.

Even though the district asked for help and Mayo ultimately stepped up, it wasn’t a process of simply handing over a check. It involved RPS leaders meeting with the organization to review the district’s finances, and Mayo asking question after question to learn about the intricacies of its situation.

Mayo Clinic Chief Communications Officer Halena Gazelka said the organization understands “the direct impact RPS has on so many of our staff and the broader community.”

“While Mayo Clinic has provided financial support to RPS in the past, this is the largest gift we have made,” Gazelka said in a statement to the Post Bulletin. “Much of the work we do together supports the healthcare needs of kids.”

Despite that ongoing communication and collaboration between Mayo and RPS, Pekel said there had never been a philanthropic request in the two and a half years he’s been with the district.

The donation is possibly the largest RPS has ever received — and it’s definitively the largest donation the district ever received from Mayo Clinic. The donation is also unique in the fact that it was given for the district’s general operations rather than being bookmarked for a specific project.

“It’s very unique,” Pekel said. “Because it’s not a grant for a particular building or a program you’re going to launch. It’s to sustain the strategic plan that is focused on transformation and the district as a whole.”

According to Minnesota Department of Education Communications Director Kevin Burns, school districts are not required to report donations to MDE. Because of that, the state department doesn’t have information about how Mayo’s contribution compares to other donations made to K-12 districts.

However, it certainly is a mile marker for RPS itself. Chief Administrative Officer John Carlson said he can’t recall a donation of more than $1 million in the more than 12 years he’s been with the district. Pekel also emphasized Mayo’s donation is the largest the district has seen in at least the last couple of decades, if not further back.

Even though the district doesn’t have to report them to the state, RPS does announce the donations it receives. Pepsi has been among the larger donors, having given more than $250,000 since 2015-16 in the form of either donations or sponsorship payments for the rights to be the district’s soft drink provider

A recent notable funding source for the district was a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, which was meant to support an initiative at RPS known as “deeper learning.” The foundation is funded and run by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

Unique though the donation may be, it does match a goal the district has outlined in its strategic plan. Under the category of “financial stability and resource allocation,” the school district outlined its intent to pursue a referendum in 2023. District leaders said this week they will pursue another referendum in 2024.

However, the strategic plan also calls for cultivating “other funding sources,” including “philanthropic and corporate resources.”

Specifically, it indicates the district’s plan to “develop a process to generate funding from philanthropic and to generate funding from philanthropic and corporate sources to advance the school district’s work.”

Part of the plan to accomplish that was to hire an employee whose work would have been dedicated to seeking out those new funding sources. However, the hiring of that position was derailed for the time when the district’s proposed technology levy failed in November.

Despite not having a dedicated person in that position, the donation from Mayo shows that the district has started finding ways to make that goal a reality.

RPS is in Mayo Clinic’s backyard, but Pekel thinks that Rochester is well positioned to access further kinds of donations because of its size. He said that’s one of the reasons he wanted to come to the district in the first place — large enough to have scale, but small enough so that even large donations don’t just seem like a drop in the bucket.

“I think people are looking for ways to find educational models that lead to improvement at significant scale,” Pekel said. “I think we are of real appeal to philanthropic organizations that want to see not just an individual school improve, but improvement happening across the system.”