Two on Worcester Public Schools budget (this one on FY25)

At Thursday's Worcester School Committee meeting, we'll get our first high-level glimpse of the administration's recommended FY25 budget. That link is to the agenda; the backup for the report of the superintendent is not yet posted. 
Note of course that this means the budget is on the agenda, so if you have something to say on the budget, it could be a good time to do so. There also will be a (mandated) budget hearing before the Committee deliberates; as the preliminary budget calendar has the projected date for that conflicting with a graduation, I'd imagine it will be rescheduled?

Two on Worcester Public Schools budget (this one on FY24)

It's been a bit since I've written anything on Worcester's budget at all, let alone this current year, and there are a few things worth understanding. 

Let's first note that the Finance, Operations, and Governance subcommittee meets on Monday at 4:45 PM. The agenda for that is here, and it does include proposed policies on cell phones and earbuds, on service animals in schools, and on emotional support dogs, as well as the current student handbook ahead of its annual changes. I'm not going to post on that here, but if any of that is of interest, go take a look.

The subcommittee also has the FY24 third quarter report, though, running through March 31.

Board of Ed meets Tuesday

It's at Wellesley High School this month, as that's the school of Ela Gardiner, who is the student member. 

And look at that: the agenda actually has topics the Secretary and Acting Commissioner are expected to address during the meeting! That's best practice...if only they could get the chair to do that, too...

Also on the agenda: the Commissioner's search; an update on safe schools for LGBTQ students; an update on the Department's vision; and a budget update.
No links as yet to backups

Liveblog will be coming your way.

about this budget year for Massachusetts schools...

 It is lousy! 

"This is a really lousy year," said Tracy O’Connell Novick describing what Massachusetts public school districts are going through right now as they plan next year’s budget.

Novick is a specialist on finance and state education funding at the Massachusetts School Committee Association (MASCA).

“Right now, my job is abut 60% standing in front of groups saying, ‘your budget is terrible. The state budget is terrible. Here's why it's terrible,’” Novick said.

(60% is probably too high...it just feels that way!) 

There is a Worcester School Committee meeting on Thursday

 Note that there is a Worcester School Committee meeting on Thursday:

https://worcesterschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20240419.pdf

Note that there does not appear to be an executive session, so expect it to start at 5:30

The report of the Superintendent is on climate and culture:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mpW68Tt7_vb9_6_s-5NI2Ftr4ERLijq8/view?usp=sharing

As per usual, no further comments...

On city finances and planning

 At the April 9 meeting of the City Council: 

Toomey makes request under suspension for a five point plan on school building finances needs and renovations.

— Marco Cartolano (@marco_cartolano) April 10, 2024

While it appears to be deleted, Councilor Toomey later clarified on Twitter that she was speaking of amending the city's five point financial plan. 

Recommended reading

My week went a bit sideways at the end here, so I haven't gotten around to a few things I'd intended to write on. In the meantime, here is some of what I have been reading:

• There are many, many things out there about the wave of organizing that is happening on college campuses on Gaza and divestment. I'd recommend this New Yorker piece, this New York Times opinion piece, and this scorcher from Columbia University's student newspaper, The Spectator, which also covered protests in solidary on other campuses; Teen Vogue covered that at the beginning of the week.

• An aspect not being discussed in the AI in education discourse is the absolutely atrocious environmental impact; read about that here in the New Republic.
  Also there's an excellent column in Education Next on artificial intelligence not being a great teacher: “This isn’t just unhelpful; it’s counterproductive to learning.”
  

• MassInc posted this piece "Musing on the House budget, SOA, families, and the state's long term fiscal health" last week. The one thing I would add here:
  

  The House budget increases Chapter 70 aid above levels required by the SOA. However, fully factoring inflation, the funding levels fall below what the SOA called for based on the estimated costs of educating students back in the 2010s.

  ...is that the increase "above levels required by SOA" is done in a way that has nothing to do with SOA, or student need, at all, as it's the $104 per pupil.  

• Today's NPR piece on historical markers, what they are for and not and what they say and don't is well worth the time.
  

  How the U.S. tells its own story is a debate raging in schools, statehouses and public squares nationwide. It has led to social movements and angry protests. But for more than a century, historical markers have largely escaped that kind of scrutiny.
  With more than 180,000 of them scattered across the U.S., it's easy to see why

on educators responding to protests

 It is days like today that I recall then Acting Commissioner Jeff Wulfson's words in 2018, speaking of the protests that followed the Parkland shootings: 

 We talk a lot here at this board about the importance of teaching students about civic engagement and how democracy works. This is it. This is as real as it gets. If this is not what we call a teachable moment, I don't know what is, and I hope our educators take advantage of this opportunity to help model and teach their students about how we bring about change peacefully in a democracy.

Remarkably, DESE sent it out as part of the Commissioner's update that week 

House Ways and Means budget: this time with more

I am doing one of my periodic comfort re-reads of Terry Pratchett;
this is a good summary of the House budget. Alas, no answers here.

Wednesday's post was a quick one. Here's some more information and some thinking on the House Ways and Means budget on K-12 education; as always, this is me, out here having an opinion in my entirely unofficial capacity. 

The budget is here, though really that's where you download PDFs. Wouldn't it be amazing if instead there were updates to the posting of the Governor's budget, with nice little clickable links, and the ability to see at a glance what changes were being proposed over time?

If you'd like at least the change being proposed, I have now started a spreadsheet of the K-12 education accounts, which is here. (I did not start that with the Governor's budget this year, and, yikes, lesson learned!).

Also, the cherry sheets--municipal; regional--are now updated and seem to be up for good now (they went up and back down yesterday).

House Ways and Means FY25 budget

 I have barely cracked this open, but it's online here. No cherry sheet update as yet.

A few brief things I already know (as always on here, this is my personal perspective):

• Disappointingly, this keeps the same inflation rate as the Governor's budget. 
  
  
• Also disappointingly, this digs us further into a hole for the districts making their way out of hold harmless by making the minimum per pupil increase $104. This costs $37M, and it's coming out of the Fair Share surtax, which, as this is an allocation of funds that has nothing to do with student, district, or community need, is really disappointing.
  This is a genuinely terrible idea, and it's actively working against the reform passed unanimously in both chambers that is the Student Opportunity Act. 
  
  
• 'Though I have not yet found this written down anywhere, I have been told that this has an increase in the low income pupil count for some districts, which has resulted in some districts moving (back?) up a low income group. There certainly is a difference in the state aid for some districts that isn't coming from the per pupil increase noted above. 

That's what I have so far...I do plan to pull together a "tracking the budget" spreadsheet this spring (I haven't yet!), and I'll run through accounts later this week. 

April 4 meeting of the Worcester School Committee

Please enjoy these daffodils from my walk from work in Boston.

While school in Worcester was cancelled, the meeting was not; my meeting was, so I got to this one in person to find that the balcony now has some who are interested in good governance of the district attending in person to keep an eye on things. Excellent. Let me know if you're coming; I'm bringing snacks. 

The agenda is here. The video of the meeting is here. 

Okay, Worcester, here's something else you can do!

On Tuesday's Worcester City Council agenda: 

That the City Council of the City of Worcester does hereby support the Worcester Public Schools’ advocacy for a higher inflation rate in the Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) foundation budget. 

Thank you, Councilor Haxhiaj!  

The Worcester Public Schools, in their FY25 budget memo to the state delegation, said the following: 

Fixing the Inflation Calculation: The inflation rate for the FY24 Chapter 70 inflation adjustment was 8.01% and for FY23 it was 7.08%. But the law caps the annual inflation adjustment of the foundation budget at 4.5%. As a result, districts did not receive funds to cover a significant portion of inflation that they had to pay for in expenses.
The way the Chapter 70 formula originally worked, that would not be a long-term problem because the lost inflation would automatically be added back to the foundation budget in the following year. But a technical change made almost a decade after the law was passed inadvertently changed that. Now when the cap reduces aid below the level needed to keep pace with inflation, that reduction is locked in forever and reduces future aid. A simple fix that maintains the 4.5% cap but makes sure that the formula makes up for lost inflation would solve the problem. That would increase Chapter 70 aid by $217 million, with additional under- inflation “catch-ups” in future years. It is important to make a permanent change in the law so that all of the aid lost is eventually made up. That is necessary to allow the Commonwealth to meet the real-dollar targets in the Student Opportunity Act. 

Action: Support the proposed language to correct a flaw in the calculation of the inflation adjustments in Chapter 70 by the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and the American Federation of Teachers of Massachusetts.

Please be sure the Worcester City Council hears from you, either this weekend, or via public comment Tuesday, to support this advocacy.

A few things that may be worth mentioning in your communication:

• The inflation rate in the foundation budget is 1.35%. There is no aspect of any budget that is increasing by only 1.35%. That will guarantee cuts.
• The inflation rate used to account (as noted above) for years in which there was an overage by carrying it over into future years. That is no longer the case.
• The Student Opportunity Act, as marvelous as it has been, is NOT for cost increases from one year to the next. It very specifically is to address historic undercalculation of categories within the foundation budget. SOA in no way removes the responsibility we have as a state to ensure that the "fair and adequate minimum" keeps up with what is needed to educate our children.
• The city's local contribution will not increase as a result of an inflation increase.

You can find the Council's contacts here. Council meets at 6:30 on Tuesday.

Some suggested reading

• On what is absolutely a test case in Oklahoma on public funding of religious schools; this is the St. Isadora online charter school 
  
  
• On the messed up priorities of a Congress that moves to ban TikTok but doesn't get schools appropriately supported
  
  
• Jonathan Haidt's new book The Anxious Generation has been getting a LOT of press; Nature Magazine has a review which finally puts the claims into context
  
  
• Bill Runey, Superintendent of the Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School District, wrote a column about district budgets this year that will resonate with many

quick note that the Worcester School Committee meets tomorrow

 The agenda is here. The report of the superintendent is on special education. 

There are ten reasons only for executive session. 

March 21 Worcester School Committee meeting

 It's budget season, which means I am all over the state, so I'll do catch up on these as I can; I wasn't at this one and I can't make the next two, either, so they'll be coming later. Do note that the Committee meets this Thursday; the report of the Superintendent is on special education. 

The March 21 agenda is here; the video of the meeting is here. The report of the superintendent on future ready pathways is here.

Note that prior to the public session, there was an executive session on two worker compensation issues and negotiations with the Mass Nurses Association.

The consent agenda was passed. 

The Burncoat High School spirit team was recognized.

What you can do on the Worcester Public Schools budget

By now, if you are the family of a Worcester Public Schools student or a staff member, you will have read the letter sent from Dr. Monárrez earlier this week regarding the FY25 budget and had a bit of a chance for it to sink in. If you haven't read it, I include the letter in full below at the end. 

You may also well have seen headlines from all over the state about school budgets facing real hardships this year.

Let's first note that it is not new information that the Worcester Public Schools are facing a budget gap. As noted in the links in the superintendent's letter (blogged about here), the district has noted the $22M budget gap since the release of the Governor's budget. We knew of the issue with the inflation budget as far back as the fall. 

There is a danger we run into this time of year, of the relative scope of the budget and budget issues being difficult to grasp. This isn't true exclusively of Worcester, but it is as true of Worcester as elsewhere. While, as noted, the gap is 4.4% of the WPS operating budget, that is a significant amount of money. 

This raises two related issues:

oh, if only they were fooling

 On this, the holiday that I loathe most, it is appropriate, I suppose, that the education reform opiners at Reason have their opinion piece, a piece of poorly informed illogic entitled "Public schools wasted COVID funds, Biden’s education budget tacitly admits" in The Hill.

None of that is true or follows, to be clear. 

The argument, lest you go melting your brain looking for it, is that, since the President's proposed budget has "$8 billion grant program to further support public schools’ COVID-19 recovery efforts," the three rounds of ESSER funding didn't work!

But nearly three years after Biden signed ARP, students still aren’t caught up, despite the federal windfall.

Well, golly, people, what have we been doing out here? 
I cannot roll my eyes any harder at this.

That part is quite stunning all on its own, but we can add to that the evidence of "waste" that they cite:

Researchers at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab estimate that 20 percent of ARP K-12 dollars have gone to facilities — HVAC upgrades and building repairs

Now, WHY, during a pandemic in which the contagion is transmitted via air, would schools want to do HVAC upgrades?

I have heard milder versions of this a number of places: how could schools--fill in the blank--add staff, pay staff more, add services when they knew this was short term funding?

This continues to lose sight of what the funding was for: it was to help schools deal with the pandemic. At the beginning--remember the spring and summer of 2020?--this included questions of if we would have state and local funding for schools at all, and if that would mean we'd need to lay staff off. As time went along, it became clear that students needed (among much else) mental health supports, which means either staffing or outside services (or both). They needed supplemental learning supports, which means either additional pay for the staff schools have currently, or additional staff, or both.
One time funding is enormously appropriate for facilities repair--a massively underfunded issue with American schools--and whether it is directly cleaning up the air or making it a bit more likely that schools won't crumble into pieces. 

I am not going to defend every last dollar spent in ESSER. I can't. I'm not all of those places. But this nonsensical and ongoing scolding, which somehow mysteriously never appears municipal side is exhausting. 

I have long since come to the conclusion that some people just don't like public entitites, even ones who are more accountable to and closer to their constituents than any other branch of government, to have money to spend on behalf of those under their care. 

Gosh, I'm tired of it.

If you'd like a look at what we know of what hasn't yet gone out to districts yet (remember: there's a delay on reporting!), K-12 Dive today looks at the 6 months left report.

a few facts on MSBA and Burncoat Middle

I'll save how angry and concerned I am that the Worcester City Council last week put a hold their vote on Burncoat Middle's Statement of Interest for a second week running, and keep this to some statements of fact:

• Communities are allowed to submit a single core project (for a major renovation or rebuild) as their priority project to the Massachusetts School Building Authority each year. They may not "send in them all and have MSBA pick" (that's a paraphrase, to be clear).
  
  
• The MSBA has a very strong tradition of allowing districts only a SINGLE core project at a time. For a very long time, and in most communities still, if a district is still in the process of building a new building, they will not move a district forward with another core project.
  
  
• Worcester is an exception to the above statement, because we have a history of moving our core building projects forward in a systematic way, and the administration has a history of completing and paying for projects as needed. Once a new building has been close to completion, the MSBA has forwarded a second project. This is how we started South when Nelson Place was still going up and Doherty when South was still going up; it is how Burncoat High was admitted to the pipeline though Doherty is not yet done.
  
  
• They will not admit a third when we are any further along than that.
  
  
• The city doesn't have the capacity to fund two new buildings at the same time in that fashion, in any case.
  
  
• When the state organization that will be picking up more than half of the cost of a multimillion dollar project does the organizational equivalent of nudging a community in the ribs and tell the community to send in the school that is contiguous to and shares systems with a building that they have already admitted to the pipeline, they are telling you something important.
  
  
• MSBA is always watching communities with projects to see if they are committed to the projects and acting in ways that ensure that they will be completed.
  
  
  

If you are concerned about this, please share that with the Worcester City Council.