I haven't posted on this because monetary decisions have to be done in public session, and so I expected, naturally, that we would see something in an agenda, and so I was waiting for that.
Fiscal year 2024 has ended; fiscal year 2025 has started.
There was no meeting called before the end of June after budget.
There is nothing on the July agenda.
There has been no vote by the Worcester School Committee to change the bottom line of the FY24 budget; there has been no vote of the Worcester School Committee to allocate funds received (it would be a prior year allocation, one assumes, now).
And yet at the City Council meeting on June 16, it seems, the City Manager said that additional funding would be forwarded to the Worcester Public Schools in response to a question from a councilor regarding minimum net school spending.
That then was raised as a question by Member Mailman at the June 20 meeting, with the response being at that point it hadn't been received yet, and that there would be a memo sent to the Committee.
It appears that was only done to the Committee2, not publicly, and there still hasn't been any action taken by the Committee.
Last Thursday night, in response to a question by Member Biancheria (noting that the district has laid off literacy tutors, and questioning both why and how it is that the superintendent spoke of hiring an 'outside contractor' for literacy tutoring), the response was that this from "extra money from the city."
The response was that this was being done from the additional $1.8M received from the city--it's homeless transportation1 reimbursement money, which the schools only get if the city actively moves it to schools--as the School Committee, it seems, received a memo about.
And that funding went to fill FY24 holes, so it freed up federal grant funds, that then can be carried over into FY25, some of which can be used for literacy tutoring.
Can the district do the above? Yes.
And the Committee votes each year--and they did this year--to authorize the superintendent to move money among cost centers to close the fiscal year.
It should be clear, though: this is not what this is.
This is new money for the district, which as not been recognized by the Committee in any way in their own action, which then is being used to provide for spending that the Committee also hasn't overseen.
The City Auditor, it seems, has said that further action by the Committee isn't needed. The auditor, though, isn't who sets state law, regulation, or guidance for districts, all of which is unified that school committees in Massachusetts both set the bottom line spending and allocate funding by cost center.
What's really, really odd to me about all of this is that the Worcester Public Schools are not--and I dare say I'm unusually well informed about this--a district where the budgetary authority of the Committee is usually in question.
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2Let me head off the obvious here and say this: my concern isn't "I'm not on the Committee, so I don't know." My concern is that it's budgetary, so we are all supposed to know, regardless of our relationship with the district.
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