Background

The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP) provided vouchers to low-income families to attend DC-area non-public schools. The program was very popular – it worked well and with federal funding of DC schools, created little local government budget pressures. In 2008, Congress began considering cutbacks for DCOSP funding – cutbacks that would eliminate thousands of scholarships for low-income DC children and deprive them of better schooling.

Threatened with the prospect of the federal government undercutting their funding, DSCOSP needed to find a way to quickly and cost-efficiently show Congress how much the program meant to DC families. We had just ten weeks and a shoestring budget to develop and implement a local grassroots effort to convince Congress to retain funding.  We wanted Congress to hear first-hand from the community how important the program was. We wanted passionate people fighting for hope for these promising young students.

Because of our limited time and resources, we focused on the demographic we felt would be most supportive: mothers of lower and middle school children. With fewer than 10,000 numbers, we launched three waves of calls into DC homes. We made the calls in the middle of the day to catch stay-at-home moms. After informing them of the DCOSP situation, we offered to patch them through to a Congressional office where they could leave a message in support of continued funding for DCOSP. We alternated our patch-through calls between Congresswoman Holmes Norton, Representative of DC and Congressman Dave Obey, the head of the committee overseeing the funding for the DCOSP. We knew that having constituents contact these members of Congress personally would emphasize the need to fight aggressively for the scholarship program.

The three waves of calls generated a groundswell of support for the DCOSP among DC residents. We managed to deliver a steady number of patches to the Congressional offices each day throughout the buildup to the decision. In total, we distributed 820 patch-through conversations from concerned DC mothers at an astonishing patch through rate of 50% (one of every two people we contacted agreed to the patch through).

As a result, the appropriations committees in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate agreed to extend the program for an additional year (the 2009-2010 school year).  Because of the DCOSP program and the support we were able to garner through our call program, low income students across DC will be granted another year of better schooling through the program.