Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and his wife donate $120million to California schools
May 30, -Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife on Thursday pledged $120 million to help schools in low-income Bay Area communities in what amounts to their biggest publicly announced donation to a local cause.
“The world’s most innovative community shouldn’t also be a home for struggling public schools,” Zuckerberg said, announcing the pledge in an essay written for this newspaper’s opinion section. He cited the example of chronically low test scores in the Ravenswood school district, which serves low-income and minority communities near Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.
“There are many heroic educators doing their best to serve students here,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But the challenges are much greater than the resources they receive.”
The announcement comes at a time when Silicon Valley companies and affluent tech workers have drawn fire from critics who accuse them of driving up real estate prices and giving little thought to lower-income communities of the Bay Area.
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have made headlines with big charitable gifts before: He gave $100 million to help schools in Newark, N.J., and the couple later donated stock worth more than $1.5 billion to a fund administered by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation — which made them the nation’s biggest charitable donors in 2013. The fund at the community foundation is intended to finance a variety of projects over many years, including a multimillion-dollar grant for health research and $5 million provided earlier this year to an East Palo Alto medical clinic.
The latest gift, which also comes from that fund, will help “improve education for underserved communities” over the next five years, Zuckerberg said. Some of the $120 million will help start new public and charter schools in the Bay Area while the rest will pay for equipment, training and other programs at existing schools. The first $5 million will go to needy schools in the Ravenswood and Redwood City school districts and other “high-need” neighborhoods of San Francisco.
Zuckerberg, who turned 30 this month, is a Harvard drop-out who became one of the world’s richest men. He’s currently worth about $28 billion, thanks to his stake in the giant social networking company he co-founded in 2004. Chan is a children’s doctor who once worked as a schoolteacher.
“Helping improve the quality of public education in this country is something we both really care about,” wrote Zuckerberg, who in 2013 taught an after-school class in entrepreneurship for a Boys and Girls Club at Menlo Park’s Belle Haven Community School.
Press journalist for hromedia – Debi Campillos contributed to this report.
Category: International
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