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.
Because I'm a bit concerned that these links go to Google Drive links that could move, here's an image of the cost center by cost center report:
As always, it is crucial to keep this into perspective--don't
bikeshed the balance!**--of the entire budget, for which the general fund totals $462.7M. While $262,544 is a significant amount (particularly if what we're most accustomed to is our family budgets), it's .00056 of the budget. So if you see the Committee pay less attention to that than they do to the interrelationship of the accounts, that's why.
Well, that and we have experienced people overseeing the budget who have done exactly this many times before. Experience matters. They're going to land the plane.
As always, the memo--always read the memo!--lays out what's going on with the cost centers. The interrelationship among the cost centers matters not only for this year, but also for next year; this third quarter report is the report that gives the closest read we're going to see ahead of the proposed FY25 budget as to what is happening with the specific allocations by center.
Overall, of course, we're seeing the same thing we've been seeing since at least 2020: the district has staffing shortages, which means balances in the salaries and deficits in the overtime accounts. This is very much in keeping with what we're seeing across the country for school districts.
Then, the second quarter report noted the larger than anticipated number of people who were taking health insurance, and students who had moved into the district who had out-of-district special education placements (that's the tuition).
The district has yet to fully take over transportation, and it's the out-of-district placements as well as mandated transportation for students who are homeless that are causing the deficit there; the memo says that those services will begin to move in house in the fourth quarter.
And we had a mild winter which yields that utilities balance.
The administration then is recommending transfers for this quarter:
Tune in Monday if you'd like to hear the discussion.
Now, I do want to mention something else about FY24, which I did mention in
my "what can we do post?" and which came up recently in an Instagram comment thread: we aren't, as a city, meeting our required net school spending.
As a reminder, the way it works is: the state says "this is a fair and adequate minimum to spend on schools," then it calculates how much of that the local community can afford, then it kicks in the difference between what the local community can afford and that minimum. The local community can kick in more than that, and most do, but they can't kick in less.
And we have. I ran a chart for you:
Do please read the note before you're impressed with FY21.***
Frankly, I have two feelings about this.
On one hand, our major discussion, as a vastly majority state funding district, is going to be with the state when it comes to operating costs. This year, 74.8% of our general fund budget is funded by the Commonwealth; that isn't changing anytime soon.
And at least initially, this was state-inflicted: this is the charter school shaking out differently on tuition and reimbursement than originally anticipated.
On the other hand, if we didn't run this so close to the line that wouldn't have been enough to cause this. If you're running 5 or 7 or 10% over net school spending, you don't find yourself dipping $620,286, then $3,033,616, and a projected $1,057,951 below.
And incidentally, the projection is on the budget as submitted at the beginning of the year; the School Committee had to cut another $800K since then.
Given the year that's anticipated, this would seem a reasonable conversation to have. It sure does make state advocacy more difficult when the 25% the state says the city is supposed to carry isn't being carried.
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*I'm told this is due to "accessibility," which, as posting PDFs of charts and graphs are done all the time by the organizations policing this, seems...a lot. But it does mean that this is all that much less accessible for those of us looking for it.
**I might meme this.
***Information in the graph is from "Chapter 70 District Profiles" downloaded here. Transportation doesn't count towards net school spending. To those who would question this, I'd remind you that our school districts range in size from the city of Chelsea, which is 2.67 square miles, to Franklin County Tech, which is 500.
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