Money, Part 1

Summary Paragraph: Part one of a series of posts in which Menin looks at the revenue problem experienced by the City and affecting the Schools, solutions we've tried, and solutions it will take to solve the problem.

After six years of declining funding, the schools are pretty threadbare, academically and physically.

While we can all agree on the effects, ranging from the loss of teachers and electives to the longer-term depressing of house values, I have to say thinking has evolved a great deal on the causes, and even more on potential solutions.

First, the City government has done pretty much everything we have asked of it over the past six years. The City Council has not, to my recollection cut any money from the school budget that it has received from the Mayor during my tenure on the School Committee; the School Committee has sent unbalanced budgets to the Mayor in 2 of the last 3 years; in four of the last six years, the Mayor has added some funds, but has not fully funded the recommended budget.

The problem is that even though the City has funded the Schools at more than the state requires it to, even that extra funding is not enough any more.

City growth isn't what it used to be; the assessments of private homes keep going up, at a rate faster than personal income, creating a widening gap between income and real property. That gap makes it increasingly difficult for people on fixed incomes to cope with additional taxes that would come with an override. That is a very real issue; as is the lack of affordable housing stock that would enable people who wanted to live out their lives in Newburyport to stay here.

In the crisis of last Spring, facing the trifecta (accumulated cuts of the previous five years had eroded academic programs to the tipping point, City growth was stagnant, and federal and state aid was not going to increase appreciably), the School Committee approved a major reconfiguration of the schools, which saved $750,000. It still left a structural deficit of more than $750,000 which the schools have had every year since 2004, when the state decided not to pay out the full Chapter 70 Funds it had committed to Newburyport.

The net result: Five years of cuts that weakened programs, virtually no new spending during that time to replace or update curriculum, and less federal money supporting schools despite the increase in meeting the unfunded mandates of No Child Left Behind.

Hoping to be able to make the most of the $750,000 in savings we gained from the reconfiguration, (a number we won't pull out of the budget again), and continue the momentum of overhauling the curriculum to bring it up to acceptable standards, we chose to go to the community to ask for an operating override in the Spring of this year. We believed that the only short-term solution to this crisis would be found in the community through an override. I believed that, and supported it.

It is also important to point out that our decision to go in the Spring was heavily influenced by Mayor Moak twice announcing at School Committee meetings that he was considering putting a debt exclusion on the ballot in November. We believed that competing with a general election, and a debt exclusion, the override would have no chance. Once we had committed to the Spring vote, the Mayor decided not to put a debt exclusion on the ballot this fall. It is also worth noting that two individuals who have been close advisors of Mayor Moak for a long time headed up the anti-override campaign.

The override failed for a variety of reasons. People felt the tax burden was already too much; people did not feel compelled to invest in the schools because they felt that they had no direct or vested interest in the schools; people felt that the school budget still had not gotten the scrutiny it deserved; people felt that "there are too many administrators and they get paid too much" (despite the recent state report that pointed out we lacked a sufficient number of administrators to manage the system effectively, and that the ones we had were spread too thin, and that our admin staff are at or below state median salaries); people didn't like the attitudes of those working for the override; and some people even felt they wouldn't vote for an override until the City itself showed a little more fiscal discipline in the budgets of other departments.

But it failed. The "Big Mo'" was lost, and the schools, though better off in some ways academically by the reconfiguration, remain in need.