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).

Let's lead with a win, as covered by The Berkshire Eagle: 

Prior to this week, the district found itself just three low-income students short of a qualifying for an additional $2.4 million from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. But Kristen Behnke, assistant superintendent for business and finance, announced Wednesday that she identified a technical error that had caused an undercount of roughly 1,500 low-income students across the state — including 11 in the Pittsfield Public Schools.

Those figures will be adjusted in the state Legislature’s upcoming budget proposals.

“It’s good news for school districts across the commonwealth,” Behnke said.

This is the drop in the low income count due to the Medicaid recertification that was part of testimony at Ways and Means (if you want to see Senator Jason Lewis and I have an exchange about this, go to five hours and nine minutes in). Ms. Behnke made the local determination in Pittsfield--which was among the 49 districts that, in losing students, dropped a whole low income group--and shared that information. I know that Pittsfield Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier was also inexhaustible on this. 

Now, it's important to note that it's not adding back the 6700 or so students statewide that dropped from last year, and, because it's enrollment, it's essentially invisible in the budgetary information that came out this week. We also can't easily track back from the updated Ch. 70 numbers to figure out where it went, as it's masked by the other dollar shifts. What would be ideal is if DESE released their House Ways and Means spreadsheet--you know that they have one! And it has been released before!--so everyone can see what exactly happened there. I'd also, honestly, like some idea of what they did. It may just be that they went back and did another round of "who matches," but I don't know that. 

The thing that is going to be touted as good news but isn't is that the House Ways and Means budget proposes using $37M of Fair Share funding to increase the minimum per pupil amount to $104, $74 more than the $30 per pupil in law. As I have noted over and over again, a per pupil minimum increment works against the very foundational principles of Massachusetts school funding: it is distributed without regard to either district or to community need.
What's particularly a problem now is per pupil minimum increases build into hold harmless, year over year, as the districts get "that much more" again next year, without regard to the foundation budget. That gets districts stuck far from ever getting back to foundation aid. The Student Opportunity Act has been the driver getting districts out of hold harmless, but we only have two years left of that; adding to the per pupil minimum (rather than, say, to the inflation rate) moves many districts farther from escape.
If the above lost you, the presentation I did for MASC last month may help.

I also want to say: it's not why I, anyway, worked for and voted for Fair Share. 

The two things above are the changes in Chapter 70 aid, which is the big K-12 education money.
Other items of interest: 

• the reimbursement to districts of free lunch is coming out of Fair Share (as it did in the Governor's budget), and is budgeted here for an additional $20M. That says to me that they have updated numbers and don't think the $170M budgeted is going to be enough.
  
  
• Circuit breaker is budgeted for $500K more, but with $950K in earmarks. The degree to which the $492M here is sufficient is being debated (this when I remind you that it is a reimbursement).
  
  
• Charter school reimbursement is budgeted identically to H2 ($198M), which I will continue to observe is $34M down from last year. It is possible that this is accurate, as the main pick up on charter schools has been Worcester's, but it makes me a little itchy.
  
  
• Regional transportation reimbursement (which is also a reimbursement, and too often isn't discussed that way) is parallel to H2 at $99M. There is no municipal transportation reimbursement. McKinney-Vento required transportation of homeless students is parallel to the H2 budget at $28M. 
  
  
• Surprisingly, rural school aid, this budget halves from the Governor's recommendation ($7.5M from $15M). 
  
  
• The House Ways and Means budget has $10M in future educator scholarships and $10M in clean energy infrastructure.

Again, you can see all the K-12 lines in the spreadsheet linked above. Amendments are pouring in. House budget debate is scheduled to start on April 24. 

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