On the city's FY24 budget

City Manager Batista released his administration's recommended FY24 budget on Friday; you can find it here on the city website.

Maybe I missed it before, but I don't remember this jazzy graphic:

This means Worcester's at least attempting the "what are we trying to do here"
connection on budgeting, which is a good place to start.

The city, per usual (and as some other municipalities do), does again do a sort of smash up version of how funding flows to the district. We get a revenue chart on page 6: 

And yes, that means we as a city get nearly as much in state education aid as we do in property taxes, and that fully 49.5% of our funding comes from the state in one way or another.
(there's also a neat little graphic showing that our state education aid includes both ch. 70 and school choice and charter reimbursement, but if it bothers me greatly that the graphic doesn't use different sized boxes for those three things)

And we have a graphic on page 7 on overall city spending:

...but what we don't have--we will Friday!--is a representation of how much of the education spending comes from city resources, though we do get this note:

Of that total amount, $44.7M provides funding of Charter and Choice schools, leaving a Worcester Public Schools budget of $462.7M. 

Of course, that $44.7M comes nowhere near municipal coffers, moving straight out of our chapter 70 aid to the charter (mostly) and choice schools and districts.

If we did have a representation of local revenue going to the Worcester Public Schools, WPS would come between fixed costs and public safety for FY24, at $138M.

...which is of course the main reason why we in Worcester pay so much attention to the state budget, were among those who filed suit in the late 80's against the state, were among the most active and vocal of districts on the foundation budget reconsideration, and threatened to file suit against the state again just before we finally got the Student Opportunity Act. 

The McDuffy decision, the case on which the state education formula rests, held:

What emerges also is that the Commonwealth has a duty to provide an education for all its children, rich and poor, in every city and town of the Commonwealth at the public school level, and that this duty is designed not only to serve the interests of the children, but, more fundamentally, to prepare them to participate as free citizens of a free State to meet the needs and interests of a republican government, namely the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It is the state's duty to provide. That is how we have a standard education formula that not only calculates how much a district must be funded, given the students the district services, but one that calculates--again in a standard way across the state--a community's ability to support that. 

And thus Worcester, like not only its sibling Gateways, but like other districts with high amounts of student poverty with low ability of the local community to contribute is seeing the Student Opportunity Act come through with increases in which the state is carrying the majority of the dollar increases. This is literally what we fought over a decade for. We are majority state funded; we are supposed to be!

That really is something we should be celebrating in this budget. It's year three of a six year implementation. 

In any case, thus, the WPS section of the budget is the dollars allocated to us; it doesn't include costs the city carries that get attributed as school spending. In our case, the largest chunk of that is health insurance, but it also includes water and sewer, things like the city treasurer and purchasing department, and police liaisons. You thus can't just take page 161 and figure out all that goes into the schools.

You can, though, see from how the city attributes the dollar increase; the state said city funding for schools was required to go up by $6.1M over last year's budget as passed (you can pull that out of the state's spreadsheets). Because the City Manager last fall requested, and the Council passed, just under $1M out of free cash to hold the schools' budget harmless when the charter tuition came through as less that was originally budgeted, from our (projected) budget, that looks like $5.1M. 
That amount--$6.1M over budget as passed last year, $5.1M over actual FY23--is what is here. 

That's meeting required net school spending. 

What this doesn't include is the city capital budget, which was the topic of much discussion at our joint City Council Education and F&O meeting earlier this year, and has been part of ongoing discussion among and between the administrations.