The Board of Ed meets today: opening comments

 You can find the agenda for today's Board of Ed meeting (indeed, all of this week's meetings!) here. This meeting will be livestreamed here.

I will update this blog post as we go. 

And because I know there will be questions...

 Worcester has moved their last day to tomorrow, Tuesday, June 18:

The last day for most of the district was Thursday--for Burncoat, Friday, due to the cancellation in December due to no heat--and Wednesday was already off due to the state observance of Juneteenth. 

No doubt, some of you are wondering: Doesn't that mean the Worcester Public Schools won't go 180 days?
Yes! This  February 2011* memo from the late Commissioner Mitchell Chester explains what Worcester is invoking here, namely item 3: 

Districts will not be expected to make up any days lost to health, weather, or safety emergencies that occur after June 1.

Enjoy the break! Here's hoping Worcester gets some cooling stations and splash pads open early, eh?

_______
*Do you remember February 2011? I do. And then that was the October when we had a Halloween snowstorm...

The Board of Ed meets more than once this week

And if you thought their special Monday meeting to receive a report might be on the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council's report, which came out last week, you'd be wrong! No, Tom Kane has another report out on "education recovery"--he has a scorecard!--so they're having a special meeting. 
Gosh, it's going to be amazing when pet projects of individual Board members don't set agenda items. Also, it would be really smart if we had people OTHER THAN ECONOMISTS talking about the impact of the pandemic on kids.

Anyway, that's at 5 PM today, only online.

Tomorrow, the Board has their usual monthly meeting in Everett with a livestream at 9 AM. On the agenda (most without backups at this time): 

• an update on the Commissioner's search
• the end of year report from the State Student Advisory Council
• an update on DESE's educational vision (there's a link on newly arrived homeless students)
• an FY25 update

You're on your own for tonight, but I'll be liveblogging tomorrow. 

EDIT: I missed one: The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meets jointly with the Board of Higher Education on Thursday at 3, in an entirely virtual meeting. That agenda includes a presentation on research of K-12 and higher ed, as well as discussions of early college and the FAFSA. 

Read the report from the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council

 Don't read the Globe, which follows its usual "CITY SCHOOLS FAILING AND NO ONE CARES BUT US" storyline; read the report itself.

Even the report itself still underplays what is the main story--MASSACHUSETTS AMONG MOST SEGREGATED DISTRICTS IN COUNTRY AND NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE AT ALL--but at least its in there, and the fact that the segregation is among DISTRICTS primarily, matters.

School districts were not handed done on a stone tablet from some higher power, folks. We could change them.

for your coping

 

This is a lousy budget season, and watching deliberation may be brutal, so I made us a coping mechanism. (There are three versions.)
Remember, there are two rounds of budget deliberation, so hang onto this for June 20!

Some hard truths on the FY25 Worcester Public Schools budget

The Worcester School Committee begins budget deliberations on Thursday at 4 pm. 

As they start these deliberations, I did want to lay out a few hard truths ahead of that.

Twenty-two million dollars is a lot of money. 
As I have said every time I have said this, I don't mean to point out the obvious, but $22M is a lot of money. This is not solved through grant funding. This is not closed through administrative cuts. This is not going to be closed without position cuts in schools. 
I am absolutely certain that we are going to hear the School Committee spend a lot of time on slivers of the budget (and in some cases, probably self-righteously defend it as budgetary oversight), but unless you are actually grappling with the actual scale of the issue, you're not solving the problem. 
Don't bikeshed the budget gap.

This wouldn't have been an issue if the inflation rate was higher. 
I've heard some rather odd framing of the Worcester School Committee decision to front SOA increases with ESSER funds during the duration of ESSER, as if somehow the district was shocked that ESSER was gone and that was what was causing the gap. 
That isn't the case at all.
We in Worcester have known how much the SOA increases were due to be since SOA was passed; the only pieces of the puzzle missing have been enrollment changes--the enrollment for WPS this year was essentially flat--and the inflation rate.
And yes, everyone has known since ESSER III was passed that FY25 was the year it would be gone.
It is the inflation rate (as some of us started noting at the end of last year) that was the issue for this budget. 
With a 4.5% inflation rate, paralleling the past two years of inflation?
Worcester would be receiving $25M more in chapter 70 aid.

There's no more money coming ahead of the School Committee making allocations. 
I've recently seen some social media action decrying the proposed budget cuts, and while I entirely sympathize, the fact of the matter is that position cuts are coming, because the state chambers both passed budgets without meaningful increases for Worcester, and the Worcester City Council passed the WPS budget that is below net school spending. It is too late now to influence additional funding for the Worcester Public Schools for FY25 to stave off position cuts. 
There's a $22M budget gap. The School Committee has to deal with that, and we're going to live with the consequences.

The Worcester School Committee has to pass a balanced budget. 
Were I a betting person, I'd bet that there will be at least one, if not more, stirring "I refuse to vote for a budget that cuts [fill in the blank here]" before a split committee vote on this budget. This is not brave if you have not done a single thing to change the bottom line. The Worcester School Committee, like every school committee and municipality in Massachusetts, must pass a balanced budget. 
That means that this budget is going to involve cuts. And, as I've already noted elsewhere, the only place there is $22M in this or any like sized school district is in positions. 

Make no mistake: this is a lousy budget year.

The WPS links won’t work

Please note that due to the new WPS website, all links prior to today (dating back at least ten years) will no longer work. 

No one is more disappointed about this loss than I.