Thursday, May 14, 2020

We're doing this again?!?

Cue this (which even has dancing)
I did this on Twitter this morning

Front page, top of the fold, five takeways from the Worcester City Manager's (proposed) FY21 budget includes this:
3. More than half of the city manager’s $721.8 million budget recommendation is going toward education. According to Augustus, $421.3 million has been allocated for education, representing 58.4% of the total city budget. He said that reflects the priority the City Council and his administration have put on education and the future of the city.

...I cannot believe we are back to this again...
The Worcester Public Schools proposed FY21 budget isn't out until tomorrow, but let's do some back-of-the-envelope math:

As best as I know, the city has no plans to fund the Worcester Public Schools anything (or much of anything) above foundation. We should note here in passing that this is extremely unusual--just about every district in the state funds above foundation, most well above foundation, and yes, most Gateways are several percentage points over--'though this is not my point.
Thus we can pull the state numbers for this: In Governor Baker's proposed FY21 budget, the Worcester Public School's budget is:
$398,714,407 
Of that, the city of Worcester is required to fund no less than:
$105,210,987
Leaving the state to fund: 
$293,503,420
Yes, that means that from a foundation budget perspective, the city funds a bit more than a quarter of the foundation budget.

That isn't all the budget for the schools, though, as transportation (and a few other small ticket items) aren't counted in the foundation budget. 
Last year, the transportation budget for the Worcester Public Schools was about $20.6M. We know that is going up by $1.5M. As an aside, that's a 7% increase, which is about the largest increase the budget is facing, which is due to the new contract with Durham.
That's an additional $22.1M, then, bringing the overall budget to about:
$419M
Of that, the Worcester contribution is about:
$127M
or
30%
And note that the increase over last year is about $23.1M total, of which $18M is state aid, thus 78% of the increase in the proposed budget comes from the state.

Can we knock this off already?


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