SHSAA vs. CSA: The Alumni Make Their Case

By Soo Kim ’93

It's been almost five years since we announced the agreement between the Campaign for Stuyvesant and Friends of Stuyvesant to make peace with one another and unite behind a single banner, the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association (the “Association”).

With this, we ended 14 years of schism and hurt. The Association itself had gone through some lean years, having been physically evicted from the school. It also nearly ran out of funds, and for a time, it lost its 501(c)3 status. But that is now in the past. Stuyvesant today has an alumni association befitting not just its status as one of the best high schools in the nation, but one that could hope to represent our strong alumni community with more than 40,000 individuals.

Of the directors who were involved at the time of the ‘Unification,’ just two, Christina Alfonso ’01 and I, still serve on this board. We ourselves were at the time part of the Young Turks that ushered in change to the Association; now, we are the last of that Old Guard. The board has been completely refreshed with highly qualified and engaged directors. The basic governance structures of the board are the same except for one distinction: we eliminated Staggered Board Terms, so now, each of the 20 directors are subject to election at our Annual Meeting of Members.

Our directors, officers, and staff are bound by state-of-the-art policies reviewed by leading law firms, adhering to the best non-profit practices. Given all that has transpired in the past with other Stuyvesant-affiliated charitable organizations, our directors insist in running the Association in a transparent manner. Our regularly scheduled board meetings meet in the Principal’s Conference Room six times a year, and are open to the public in person or via conference call. Our Financials, Form 990s, and Minutes of Past Board Meetings are available on our MyStuy portal, open to any member who has registered.

Our commitment to accountability is critical given that the stakes are higher than ever. When this fiscal year is complete, we expect to have raised in excess of $7.5 million over the past five years. We view this as an affirmation of progress—that we have regained some of the trust of our alums and that we are starting to inspire them to give back to Stuyvesant.

What do we do with those monies raised? It’s obvious to see the impact of alumni gifts when you visit the Weinstein Library or the Zahn Innovation Lab. The new Lin Robotics Lab is the next step in the evolution of the entire Stuyvesant technology curriculum guided by Principal Eric Contreras’s vision and generous support of the alumni. Notably, we contributed myriad smaller gifts that help Stuyvesant clubs and teams such as chess, Speech and Debate, and Science Olympiad. For the first time, we have established a permanent endowment for Stuyvesant’s Ultimate Frisbee teams, and we also funded the Bell Choir. A few years ago, we stepped in to provide emergency funding to save SING! that year after a change in DOE rules that created unforeseen financial burdens. Last year, we gave over $100,000 of college financial aid to graduating seniors. We have been fortunate to partner with the alumni community to meet the needs of the Stuyvesant community with such tangible metrics. But, we need to do more.

Money is just one way we can measure the impact the Association has on Stuyvesant. We run an Alumni Mentoring program that connects over 120 current students to dozens of alumni to teach things which you cannot learn in the classroom. We fund the StuyPrep program in conjunction with the school club and ARISTA, providing free SHSAT Prep to over 100 underrepresented minorities. We have helped students aspiring to enter research competitions find labs and mentors. We have touched the lives of hundreds of students each year and it’s still not enough. We need to do more.

We also focus on building fellowship among our alumni. We maintain an active contact database of more than 20,000 alums as well as a social media presence, which includes a Facebook group with 10,000 active members. We publish multiple Alumni Spectators per year and operate the school store. We have also trademarked “Stuyvesant” so we can capture the power of the brand for the benefit of the school. Each year, we help organize reunions for multiple classes. Last year, we brought back over 1000 alumni to the school as we hosted reunions for the 5th, 10th, and 20th classes—our largest turnout yet—and we fully expect to build upon that in future years so that more and more people from each class choose to come back to Stuyvesant.

Why do we do this? Because we are Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant isn’t about a building or the classes you take. Nor is it about the teachers and administrators (with no disrespect to all the wonderful ones we are fortunate enough to have). Stuyvesant is—and has always been—the students themselves.

I ask people to remember this when thinking about why they should give to Stuyvesant. We are giving to the person we were. This is a purer form of altruism because there is nothing directly in it for donors. Our gifts cannot gain our children or relatives admissions. And unlike the common misperception, we know that the school is funded like any other public NYC high school and that the students don’t have rich parents to lean back on because we didn’t either. All we had is each other. And like how we proved at Stuyvesant everyday, that was enough then and will be enough for the future as long as we never forget.

We understand that Stuyvesant can be a lonely experience, and many of us have chosen to leave our homes and communities to attend this school so far away. It’s almost an unnatural act for most 14-year-olds Americans. But what we lose by leaving our homes, we gain in each other. We become each other’s community. This is what I mean when I say the following: we are Stuyvesant.

If you take this to its logical conclusion, Stuyvesant doesn’t have to end after our four years together. High school ends, but we can still share our journey together. And since all Stuyvesant graduates share this experience, you will all join the greater community when you leave Stuyvesant. We alumni, as we did when we were students, can continue to push and pull each other to ever greater heights.

We invite all who have been a part of the Stuyvesant community (past or present) to join us as we say “We are Stuyvesant.”

By Daniel Glasser ’81, Dr. Jeff Golland ’57/P’92, Dr. Beth Knobel ’80, and Jim Stergiou ’67

Stuyvesant may be New York’s best high school, but its alumni association is far from the best.

The Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association (SHSAA)—whose mission is to nurture the alumni community and raise funds to support current Stuyvesant students—is poorly run, shuns accountability, and is unresponsive to its constituents. Though it may have good intentions, it is squandering the vast potential of Stuyvesant’s alumni network.

Why does this matter to you, the current students of Stuyvesant? Because you stand to benefit today from a vibrant and effective alumni association. Soon, you will graduate, and SHSAA will be your organization, too. We believe you deserve to hear what SHSAA will not tell you and does not want you to know regarding the serious flaws in its operations and governance.

Its elections are meaningless. SHSAA doesn’t trust Stuyvesant alumni to choose their own leaders. New candidates for the SHSAA Board of Directors are hand-picked by SHSAA’s current leadership. In the most recent elections, there were exactly the number of board nominees as there were open positions on the board, making the “election” by paid members nothing but a rubber stamp. There is a separate Board of Trustees selected to manage SHSAA’s endowment, but there is no transparency to how members of this board are chosen either. Without meaningful elections, SHSAA leadership looks more like a Politburo beholden only to itself than a representative body serving the alumni community.

There are serious financial questions. SHSAA’s financial reporting is inadequate and slow, making it difficult for donors to know whether operations are done efficiently. It releases minimum required information and has resisted calls to offer greater financial transparency to its members. Access to the Board Minutes and Financials page on SHSAA’s website is protected by a password and restricted to registered alumni only, and recent full-year financial reports contain roughly a dozen lines of concrete information. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that more than a third of the Alumni Association’s budget is being spent on its own administration rather than on the school; SHSAA confirmed as much in a New York Times story in 2017. If an organization like Charity Navigator were to rate the SHSAA, it would likely get a low rating because of its high overhead. Donating to Stuyvesant through the SHSAA has become an economically inefficient way of helping the school and its students.

Its governance is slipshod. SHSAA leadership has repeatedly ignored its own rules and procedures and has changed its rules frequently for questionable reasons without informing alumni in a timely manner. For example, in 2018, SHSAA eliminated term limits for members of its Board of Directors—the same term limits that it insisted were industry-standard and essential when it enacted them in 2013. There have been numerous significant changes to the roles of the paid employees of SHSAA and turnover in these positions without clear communication to the alumni community about the reasons for these changes.

If the SHSAA will not follow its own rules and does not communicate with alumni effectively, how can it possibly be trusted to steward millions of dollars in alumni donations? Right now, it can’t. We know of numerous alumni donors who have cut their ties to SHSAA over the past few years because they have lost confidence in the performance and accountability of the organization.

Several years ago, a loose confederation of hundreds of concerned Stuyvesant alumni from across six decades came together and has been reaching out to SHSAA since then in the spirit of collaboration, encouraging greater transparency and accountability. This group includes Stuyvesant alumni who have graduated in every decade since the 1950s; it also includes some current Stuyvesant students. This group’s hope has been that by exercising patience and polite persistence, it would convince SHSAA’s leadership to act in the interests of the alumni community that it aims to serve and to reform its practices. One would expect that, as an alumni service organization, SHSAA would value such feedback and respond with sincere interest and good will.

Instead, these efforts have been treated with contempt by SHSAA leadership. For asking SHSAA to live up to its responsibility to represent the entire alumni community in a transparent and effective manner, we and other concerned alumni have been referred to publicly as malcontents, rebuked at during SHSAA board meetings and on social media, and even banned from SHSAA’s official Facebook page for expressing dissenting views. Reform-minded alumni who have attempted to work from within by joining the SHSAA Board of Directors have quickly learned that such efforts are fruitless in the face of stonewalling by SHSAA leadership.

We ultimately concluded that as currently comprised, the Alumni Association is not an effective steward of the Stuyvesant alumni community and its resources. This is why we have taken the regrettable step of asking all Stuyvesant alumni to withhold all support from SHSAA by refusing to attend its events, not paying its membership dues, and redirecting charitable support to other organizations that support Stuyvesant, such as directly to the school’s departments and clubs or to the Parents’ Association. This boycott of SHSAA will remain in place until its leadership demonstrates with tangible actions that it is committed to operational excellence, transparency, and accountability. Please note that this is a boycott of the SHSAA—not a boycott of giving to Stuyvesant. More money will be directed to student needs if it is donated to the Parents’ Association instead of to the SHSAA, thanks to the Parents’ Association’s low overhead.

Please do not mistake our dissent for disloyalty. We continue to be strong supporters of Stuyvesant, and we believe that all Stuyvesant alumni should both remain connected to and give back to the school. We believe that the SHSAA is uniquely equipped to serve the alumni community; we don’t want it to fail, and we don’t want the chaos of multiple, competing organizations purporting to represent our community, as has occurred in the past. All we are asking for is that SHSAA become a transparent, accountable, and effective organization. We believe that our community deserves an alumni association that is as committed to excellence as Stuyvesant is itself.

We ask that other Stuyvesant alumni, parents, teachers, and friends join us in withholding their support from the SHSAA and helping us bring needed change. The readers of The Spectator, the current students and future graduates of New York’s best high school, deserve nothing less than a first-rate alumni association.