Worcester meetings this week: back to school, closing FY21, and transportation

 There are two Worcester Public Schools meetings this week:

On Tuesday, there is a back to school forum at 6 pm. Please note that you can submit questions to be answered (use the same link; the form is there in several languages) until tomorrow (Monday) also at 6pm.
As a side note, the School Committee didn't get asked about scheduling here, so not all of us can make it, including me.
As per usual, that will be streamed on Facebook, as well as via the Zoom link. 
Note also that Molly McCullough has been collecting answers we know already on this Facebook post.

On Wednesday, there is a Finance and Operations subcommittee meeting at 4:30 pm. There are two items on the agenda: the closing of the books on FY21 and a transportation update. 
The FY21 closure demonstrates, first, why I'm always a little confused by the question of how much funding the district 'gives back to the city': 

...and second, that the WPS Budget office is just damn good at their job. Remember that the school district is allocated a particular amount of funding--in our case, it is the MINIMUM amount of funding legally required--to education the children of the city of Worcester. Anything that isn't spent by June 30 goes back to the city to be certified as free cash.
If we have the money for education, it gets spent on education. Period. I've been searching for a metaphor for landing a $372M budget on $3--one doesn't 'land' aircraft carriers, I suppose--but take something very big and make it end up on something very small, and you're there. 
Thus, what is an annual h/t to the WPS Budget office.

Second, remember school buses? 
Maybe you also remember back in March of 2019, when the (then) Worcester School Committee received a report on moving to self-operated transportation, projected not only to offer better service (largely due to management)  but also to save the district $30M over ten years?
And then decided to renew with Durham instead?

Time to have that conversation again, as the contract with Durham is up this year. 
F&O has the full transportation report back on this agenda, but with an update, as we now have an additional opportunity within the self-op: We have money that we can use to buy buses. 
You may not be surprised to find that this means additional savings and more quickly; here's the financial rundown: 

Yes, that's up to $40M in total savings over ten years, or on average $4M a year.
That starts with FY24 at $3.8M.

As I've said before, it's against the state code of ethics to pre-deliberate before a meeting. I also think I've posted plenty about this before, (including my actually pulling papers right about when this decision was made, shortly after yet another morning when I was getting texts from my kids, wondering where their bus was).
But if you have something to say on transportation, now's the time.