Learning the parts of a story through a budget update

 It's undoubtably partly due to it being back to school week in Worcester, but I was reminded of teaching freshman English in reviewing this week's Worcester School Committee agenda and in particular the FY23 budget update.
Did you learn about the parts of a story in English class?

Remember this? 

Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution

We open our story with the Worcester School Committee passing an FY23 general fund budget of $417,802,152 back in June. That's the beginning.

The rising action is that Governor Baker then signed a final FY23 state budget on July 28 (yes, four weeks into the fiscal year). 

And here's the climax: that budget funds the Worcester Public Schools at $945,067 less than the budget the Worcester School Committee passed in June. 

Let's stop here for a minute at the top of our plot line and talk about why. 

Chapter 70 aid--state aid for K-12 education in Massachusetts--gets allotted by district. So you can pull up a spreadsheet that says "Worcester is getting $316,240,166 in state aid." 
But that same aid is what supports all of the funding for students from Worcester who go to charter schools, and all of the funding that accompanies students who live in Worcester but use school choice to attend a public school in another town. That gets pulled out of Worcester's state aid before it gets to the Worcester Public Schools.
The state runs an updated assessment when they put together the final state budget numbers, and that includes updated enrollment figures and assessments for both charter and school choice. Thus as Mr. Allen explains: 

Charter school tuition assessments increased by $334,788 in the final state budget, primarily due to transportation assessments for the Learning First Charter School that were not included in prior charter school tuition assessments (an increase of $876,567), offset by a decrease in the projected number of 32 charter school students totaling $541,779.

So the number of students enrolled in charter schools is actually down, but the transportation assessment (the Worcester Public Schools has to either transport or fund transportation for all Worcester students attending Worcester schools, charter, private, or parochial) for Learning First came through at the same time at $876,567...quite an increase in the assessment.

Likewise on choice, we have:

School choice tuition assessments increased by $417,217 in large part based on the final school choice assessment from the prior year, and the final FY22 school choice assessment in June was $96,969 higher than the most recent prior estimate from March—not including virtual school students. Pre-enrollment estimates from the two Commonwealth Virtual Schools for the upcoming school year increased from 149 in FY22 to 171 students in FY23.

What's interesting to me here is that the big jump is from the prior year--FY22--not the current one. 

Thus, we're almost a million dollars down in funding from the budget we passed in June. 
Not a comfortable place to be at all/in August/at any point in the year.

However, here's the falling action to the resolution:

The Acting City Manager has agreed that he will recommend that the City Council appropriate anticipated FY22 Free Cash to fully offset this change in the state budget, thus resulting in no change for the Worcester Public Schools FY23 Budget.

 (You have to admire that we get this after the finance charts in the memo).

Note that this will not happen until the city goes to settle free cash in November, thus we're living in this in between period until then. I believe this is why we have the note on the use of ESSER  funds; otherwise, we'd have to vote to cut our budget, as assurance by the executive of the use of free cash isn't enough to make the numbers reconcile. Nonetheless, much appreciation to Acting City Manager Batista for making that commitment. It's certainly a happier resolution than far too many budget memos I've had reason to blog about!