Doing Some 'Splainin

Summary Paragraph: In which Menin discusses the budget process, the types of budget the Superintendent submits; tries to clear to fog a little about why if we are adding money into the budget every year are we cutting teachers and programs.

During the upcoming budget process, you will hear several terms tossed about. Although they seem the same, they are not, and represent very different concepts. So a brief explanation will help.

The School Committee has, over the past several years, asked the Superintendent to prepare a Level Services Budget as the first document we will work with. A Level Services budget is one that provides exactly the same services as last year, adds no additional programs, and reflects only the estimated cost increases to those items we know or can expect to increase. Those would include salary increases as contracted; additional Special Education costs (which are always speculative; you don't specifically know from year to year how many children will need services, and the depth of services they will need, all highly variable cost drivers); and finally operating costs like heat and electricity.

While the expense side of the budget has risen every year because of these three factors, the schools have not been funded with a Level Services budget in five years.

Once we have seen what it will cost to preserve exactly what we have from last year to the next, we then ask the Superintendent to prepare a Level Funded Budget. A level funded budget assumes that their will be no change in revenue from one year to the next, and absorbs all cost increases within the same bottom used the previous year. Our expectation when we ask the Superintendent to provide the School Committee with both kinds of budgets is that any kind of efficiencies that can be wrung out the system be done- whether that is finding a new consortium to order cheaper toilet paper from, or job-sharing.

This obviously requires cuts.

The School Committee has not, to my knowledge, had a Level Funded budget funded in five years. That means dramatic cuts, program cuts, reconfiguration.

In the past five years, it has been my experience that once we have received the Level Funded Budget, we proceed to public hearings. We listen to the recommendations of the Superintendent, which are informed by the Administrative Council (Principals and other administrative staff) which are in turn informed by each School Improvement Plan, and then we proceed to cut the budget to pieces to fit the revenue we expect to receive.

Let me reiterate for those who fell asleep during the first paragraph.

There are three major cost drivers affecting the Schools every year: contractual salary obligations, Special Education costs (about 25% of our budget serving about 10% of our student population), and energy costs.

In the last three years, we have experienced literally a 50% increase in health insurance costs.
In one year, we saw energy costs rise by over 50%. Our Schools are especially affected by those cost increases, as they are older, the Nock has building envelope problems that allow a lot of heat to escape, and our heating systems at the Nock and Bres are old and not particularly efficient.

All you need to do is look at your own phone bills, heating bills and grocery bills to know that you aren't talking any longer than you used to on the phone, you've turned your thermostat lower and you aren't eating any more than you did one or two years ago, but it costs more- significantly more for exactly what you got last year, or two years ago.

I am perfectly willing to engage in a discussion about teacher salaries, as a budget cost driver, and perhaps one we might have the most flexibility to address, but any analysis that asserts every penny of the "new money" pouring into the schools goes into funding salaries is very simplistic, divisive, and inaccurate.

A thorough analysis of the entire city budget will find that not only do the Schools and Library have among the best salary to overall budget percentages of all City departments, but that the increases in actual dollars experienced by the Schools to buy less service is not disproportionate to what has happened at every other City department.

Anyone can take figures out of context and make them say what you want.

Again, I am not saying that the salary schedule and format negotiated three years ago isn't a part of the increase in costs; but it is a part of them.

And by the way; even though I am a teacher, and have a drawer full of low-end pay-stubs to prove it, I was the only School Committee member to vote down the last contract.
At the time, I said it was painful for me to do so, but that I believed that the salary scale negotiated was mortgaging the future, and that when push came to shove, down the road, people would be pointing fingers at the teachers as the reason we were having financial problems.

Oh, yeah. You'll notice that we never talked about a Value-added or Restorative budget.
That's when you put money back in or shift it around to restore or rebuild programs, or fundamentally change curriculum direction. We have done one of those in six years. Last year, despite the cuts, we managed to put $60,000 in beefing up middle school math.