A quick note on Worcester Public Schools FY24

 While I plan to write up what did (and didn't) happen at the Worcester School Committee meeting on Thursday (very interesting meeting!), I did want to quickly note that the T&G caught the news of the night, which was setting a new bottom line in the FY24 (current year) budget. While the backup memo is posted here, the School Committee agendas now have backups that go to Google Drive files that don't allow download or copying, so I've screenshotted and posted the full memo here. 

I hope the Committee changes that; it makes it feel as if access is deliberately being limited. As they aren't being posted as PDFs, it also means one cannot mark and link to particular pages. 

There's really two pieces of news here within this memo:

The first, coming with the final vote on the FY24 (which, remember, started in July), is that, as was noted at the first quarter report in the fall, the charter reimbursement for the Worcester Public Schools is not fully funded: it's $688,455 short. That amount was cut from the paraprofessional account--an account, as was also noted in the first quarter, with vacancies--and the new bottom line for FY24 set that much less. It's that $688,455 less from the $1.2M that was already moved out of the account in the first quarter report.

The new bottom line of the budget is $461,862,571 in the general fund.

And kudos, incidentally, to Member Sue Mailman, who, in her new capacity as MASC Division IX chair (as of January), noted that this was an issue for state level advocacy, and made a motion that passed 8-1, Biancheria in opposition, to raise at the state level, including with the state delegation. One of the pieces of the Student Opportunity Act is that charter reimbursement is to be fully funded now. Worcester's, at least, was not. That's wrong, and we should be clamoring about that to say the least. It's a core piece of the School Committee's fiduciary and advocacy responsibility to see that our reimbursements are fully funded. 

The second piece of news is the school piece of a City Council item from December 5; tucked in among the finance items the night of the tax classification hearing was this memo (that link goes to the Council version) that creates, with an initial investment of $1M, of a school capital maintenance fund.
As Mr. Allen outlines in his accompanying memo to the Worcester School Committee: 

It is, of course, a longstanding need, but it has gone unrecognized til now, as the schools' capital funding has been level funding. It is the prioritization of school facilities under Dr. Monárrez and the collaboration with City Manager Batista which means we've finally moved beyond people talking about it, to something being done about it. 

A hopeful beginning to the FY25 process in Worcester. 

Full WPS memo: