Baby, you can drive my car... My Position

We have a legal responsibility to provide educational services for all students based on their gifts and challenges that is exceeded only by our moral responsibility as a community to do so.

The legal responsibility is clearly enumerated by my reading of state and federal laws. The moral responsibility has been shaped by a lifetime of work with people facing all kinds of challenges; I have both a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree in the Science of Special Education, and began working working as a volunteer with children with challenges when I was 11 years old.

Unless the state steps in more aggressively to regulate these services, Newburyport faces the same expense predicament every other school system faces:

The cost of delivering services is rising faster than 2.5%, and faster than the rate of inflation.

From year to year, as children enter into our schools from pre-K through whatever grade they enter, it is not possible to specifically predict who will need support services- we are prohibited by law from even asking those questions as we admit kids. So we never know how many kids will need the services.

Until they are evaluated, we never know the intensity of services we will need to provide.

We have tried to control these costs in several ways that actually provide more benefits than just dollars for the system. We have one of the lowest out-placement rates in the state, meaning that we have made remarkable efforts to keep these students in this community and ensure they receive all the services they need. While this meets the moral criteria I mentioned, it also saves us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in potential out-placements.

How much can this cost center impact on a budget annually- I can't recall a surplus in the SPED line items in six years; I can recall several deficits that were met by transfers from within frozen line items in the existing budget of the year in question; and we have had to go into the Choice account to pay for significant SPED deficits at least once as I recall. In excess of $100,000. In the area of SPED, we have traditionally been very conservative (i.e., over-budgeted) in this line item.

It is always a wild card, and certainly qualifies as a budget driver.

Next up, those pesky buy-back and longevity clauses.