Berik Kaniev, Chairman of the Board of Directors of RFMS, spoke in an interview about why the first school endowment fund was created in Kazakhstan and how the RFMS brand will expand beyond the country.
— Could you tell us why you created the Endowment Fund, because RFMS already has a board of trustees that actively helped and sponsored the school?
— In 2009, the RFMS established a board of trustees, which included school graduates, and indeed, the council actively supported and sponsored various programs and initiatives by the school itself. But at some point, we came up with the idea that it was better to raise money and multiply it in order to use only investment income for school programs. We took this model from the world's best educational institutions. For example, Phillips Academy or Harvard University have the largest endowment funds in the world that support graduates. The model is the same: only investment income is used for the needs of the educational institution, and at the same time, all graduates see that their target money is not being spent, saved and working.
In our case, the fund's investment income will be used to support the Olympiad movement, increase grants to talented students, improve the school's infrastructure and, most importantly, support the best teachers.
— You registered an Endowment Fund earlier this year, what are the results?
— The decision to launch the fund was made in December 2016 by our Board of Trustees; the fund itself was registered in April 2017. I would like to note with gratitude that in a few months, school graduates have already supported the initiative and to date, the fund has collected about 600 million tenge.
— Surely the fund has a target to strive for so that the investment income that will be sent to school every year is sufficient to implement your ideas?
— Yes, we have a strategic plan for the development of the fund itself, and we have a certain benchmark that we would like to achieve, which is about $10 million over 5 years.
Today, the fund brings in an investment income of 137,000 tenge every day, and we have already started investing this money in schools. Our first project, which will be implemented at the RFMS thanks to the fund, is the opening of a new, renovated and equipped mathematics class. We want to show the effectiveness of the fund's work on specific visible improvements. And starting in September, we will start supporting the academic part, introducing new robotics sections, and supporting the school's best teachers so that they have time for self-development.
— And who makes decisions regarding the use of the fund's investment income?
— Now this is the fund's management, but in the near future we plan to create an investment committee that will directly decide where investment income will be directed. I can say for sure that the fund is a non-profit organization; all investment income will go only to the needs of schools, teachers and students.
— Essentially, an endowment is a wheel that works by itself. The more people invest, the greater the investment income, and the more possible projects and ideas can parents, teachers and students implement at school?
— That's right, and the most important thing here is transparency in the use of funds and reporting. And in our case, the fund will exist as long as the school itself will exist. And we plan that RFMS, with more than 40 years of history, will exist for many generations to come. Today, the school is a non-profit joint-stock company with government participation, but state training programs cannot always compete with private ones. Thanks to the fund, we will be able to raise the bar for public schools. This is the tool that will allow public schools to compete with the best private educational institutions.
— Is it possible to scale up the success of the RFMS brand in Kazakhstan and abroad?
— Last year we opened the second RFMS school in Astana. We want to keep RFMS in Astana and Almaty as a brand, but at the same time we can take over several more Kazakh schools in the regions, whose best students will have the opportunity to continue their studies at RFMS in Almaty and Astana. We are currently discussing such a project.
The fact is that this year we joined the international consortium of STEM schools. And as part of this international training program, we want to create our own specialized program to be implemented in several specialized schools in Kazakhstan. In fact, these schools in the regions can study under an international program and, thus, in the future, RFMS's experience may be scaled up to different schools with a mathematical background. For us, this is a big platform for finding talented students who can study at the RFMS. And for regional schools, this is an opportunity to receive high-quality education, which is now available in schools in Almaty and Astana. This can improve the quality of education for schoolchildren in the regions.
To date, we have already signed memorandums with several international universities, thanks to which their students and teachers will teach RFMS students applied skills. For example, MIT representatives have already launched robotics and programming courses here earlier this year. This summer they came to us again to conduct a flight school. We want RFMS to become a world-class school so that its graduates can easily enter the world's leading universities.
— Technology is now changing the entire learning process. What is the point of educational institutions when everything is online? Trying to preserve the legacy without a technological upgrade makes no sense.
— The model that existed in education before the technological revolution is, of course, becoming obsolete. We understand that schools need more applied subjects. Our goal is to teach children how to work with all innovative and technological tools that will help them use them when they enter adulthood. Mathematics and other subjects should help with this by building strong logical thinking in children.
— How do you work with graduates and parents. How to build relationships with parents if they don't really want to delve into school problems?
— The tools are actually simple. We have a parent committee, a board of trustees, and we have good relations. In addition, we have very active social networks and open platforms, for example, a website where you can exchange views. Moreover, we conduct anonymous online surveys to measure parental satisfaction. At the end of last year, the level of satisfaction was very high — more than 80%. We are currently developing a platform where every graduate, and there are more than 10,000 of them, can find classmates and continue communicating. In fact, this is a kind of “classmates” — a platform created specifically for school graduates with elements of a private club.
We will tell you more about all our news, ideas and plans at a major event dedicated to the school's 45th anniversary. On October 14, I invite all friends, RFMS graduates and parents to the Halyk Arena in Moscow. Almaty, which will bring together school graduates of many generations who now live in different countries and work in various industries. There we will talk about our new strategic areas of development and we are confident that many of them will receive support.
