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Shopping Centers Today -> October 2003
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MALL RESCUES SCHOOL ACTIVITIES, OFFSETTING CUTS
BY DONNA MITCHELL
A shopping center is helping offset state education funding cuts in the Mesa, Ariz., school system, and helping encourage students to graduate.
Since January, Superstition Springs Center, a 1.3 million-square-foot super-regional mall in Mesa, Ariz., has helped out Jefferson Elementary School, about a mile away, through its Adopt-a-School program by raising funds for academic activities.
“We wanted to embrace the community,” said Dee Ross, SCMD, who was manager of Superstition Springs Center when the program began. The center is owned by Phoenix-based Westcor Partners, a subsidiary of The Macerich Co. “We wanted to make sure we were giving back in the right ways.” (Ross has since become manager of Chandler (Ariz.) Fashion Center, another Westcor property.)
It was also a way for the center to raise its profile in the community following the completion of a remodeling last November that revamped furnishings, lighting and the center’s facade.
Mesa includes some lower-income households and transient families, Ross says, and its high schools have a significant dropout rate of 3.39 percent — though this is well below the statewide dropout rate of 9.5 percent. The idea is to instill a sense of achievement and excitement about learning into the city’s elementary and middle-school students, so that they might eventually finish high school, she says.
Not only do such programs help fill school budget gaps, but they make good business sense, too, says Carolyn J. Feimster, SCMD, president of CJF Marketing International, a North Brunswick, N.J.-based shopping center management company, which is not connected with the program.
“Because of shrinking marketing budgets, both mall-based and companywide, malls are challenged as to how they can reach the community in a more cost-efficient way,” said Feimster. School programs are a popular choice, she adds.
Superstition Springs Center has been responsible for several programs and services at Jefferson Elementary. Among them is an accelerated math program that allows teachers to adjust instruction to a pupil’s strengths and weaknesses, says Frank Wilson, the school’s principal. In June the mall sponsored an awards assembly to acknowledge honor students. It also provided refreshments and arranged for a drawing of 14 bicycles donated by some of its retail tenants. The refreshments at a sixth-grade promotion ceremony also came courtesy of the mall.
Superstition Springs Center tapped its general contractor and other business contacts to donate some badly needed playground equipment, including canopies and shades to shield school children from the intense Arizona sun. The mall itself donated a number of benches. The teachers get a staff luncheon every quarter, and mall staff participates in academic tutoring programs. In all, the center’s contributions were worth about $37,000, according to Ross.
For Jefferson Elementary, the mall’s help came just in time. State cutbacks had forced the school to suspend the accelerated math program. And after a private donor withdrew from the bicycle giveaway program, the parent-teacher association could find no way to maintain it, Wilson recalls.
This is a good act of corporate citizenship to try to stimulate students, says John Wright, vice president of the Arizona Education Association, a teachers’ organization. Such activities help students understand how critical a high school diploma will be for future opportunities, he said.
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