Complex School Budget Bows In (MA)

June 4, 2010

With stimulus funds boosting one side and the sucker punch of the state’s negative inflation factor bruising the other, the Worcester public schools budget proposal will limp into City Hall this afternoon at 0.1 percent lighter than the current budget. The School Committee will meet from 4 to 6 p.m. for the first of two budget sessions.

The budget will be $264,083,901, which is $271,464 less than the current year’s $264,355,365.

Pretty much nothing is straightforward in school financing. Those totals include local and state education aid, state fiscal stabilization funds, unemployment, health insurance, retirement and workers compensation, but don’t include federal and state grants or the school system’s revolving funds. The grand total including those is $316,473,654. Here’s another total to consider: Counting just salaries and ordinary maintenance, the proposal is 4.8 per cent higher than the current year.

The budget:

• Uses $11.9 million in federal stimulus money (including state fiscal stabilization money) to save 238 jobs;

• Has a foundation (minimum) level of spending reduced by $6 million, thanks to the state’s -2.2 percent inflation factor;

• Includes a $215,607 (2 percent) increase in the administration salary account and a $976,277 (-0.8 percent) decrease in the teacher salary account. But remember how nothing is straightforward? That administration account doesn’t reflect the elimination of a school plant administrator, because that’s in the school plant account. The increase is because of contractual salary increases and the need to replace lost grant money for some positions, according to Brian E. Allen, the district’s chief financial and operations officer;

• Includes cuts to bus monitors, custodians and clerks;

• Moves 16 teachers from the Spanish/English bilingual program into the English-as-a-second-language program, to help students integrate into mainstream classrooms, a move that officials hope will boost students’ content knowledge;

• Converts part-time English and math instructional coaches into full-time instructional coaches;

• Combines the positions of manager of student support services and director of English language learners;

• Moves preschools from Rice Square and Thorndyke Road elementary schools to Vernon Hill and McGrath elementary schools to free up classroom space at the first two schools for smaller class sizes;

• Eliminates the Worcester public schools print shop (saving s: $108,847) in favor of using Worcester Technical High School’s services.

The budget is the first compiled by Superintendent Melinda J. Boone, who took the job last summer. Without the cuts contained in the budget, the district would have faced a projected $16.8 million shortfall.

Cuts include 140 positions, among them 26 middle and high school teachers.

School Committee members said they would look for ways to move more money into classrooms. Committee member Brian A. O’Connell said he would rather see the principals of the city’s two state-designated Level 4 schools become principals elsewhere in the system than have them take seats in district administration and bring their salary accounts there. The principals were reassigned to qualify schools for federal aid.

“They were and are highly gifted principals, and as vacancies occur … they should be appointed as principals,” Mr. O’Connell said.

He would also like to see the city take less of the school system’s grant money in fees and return the Medicaid funds that it collects on behalf of work that the schools do, he said.

School Committee member John F. Monfredo said the district should consider leaving positions vacant and using the money toward the teacher account.

Committee member Dianna Biancheria said she feels that she has received “filtered information,” because the numbers still seem to be changing, and she has heard from staff members who claim they have had to change their jobs.

“I get the (budget) book, and it’s not with all of the pieces of the puzzle,” she said.

The school district’s budget relies on both the state b udget, which sets school aid, and the city budget, which gives the school side a bottom line figure. Both of those budgets are still in play.