Parents To NHPS: More $ Needed For Schools Upkeep

Will next year’s schools budget have enough money set aside to fix bathrooms with no sink handles and school buildings that get too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer?

So asked Jailene Ramos, the mother of a student at High School in the Community, at a Tuesday night budget forum hosted by New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Supt. Madeline Negrón at Wilbur Cross High School

Negrón’s answer: Yes … but.

Yes, her team is creating a plan to begin addressing issues related to deferred maintenance at buildings in need of repair. But, she said, having enough money to make much of those fixes happen is also contingent on whether or not the Board of Alders approves the district’s budget request of $220 million — which is $12 million higher than what Mayor Justin Elicker has put in his proposed new city budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Negrón and her team presented that NHPS 2024 – 2025 budget request to the public during Tuesday’s community forum at Cross. Their presentation detailed what drives district costs and where revenue goes in the school budget. (Click here to view the presentation in full.) 

The district has put forth a budget request of $220,076,118 for the 2024 – 25 school year. That includes contractually required salary increases as well as rising costs related to an influx of students with disabilities, those struggling with homelessness, multilingual learners, and those with greater need for mental health supports. 

Negrón emphasized that this year’s budget proposal, which the team described as bare bones and with few new programs or staff, has the goal of ​“making sure we are doing right by [students].”

NHPS Chief Finance Officer Linda Hannans added that despite student enrollment being on a decline since 2017, the cost of required expenditures like maintenance, transportation, and wages continue to rise. 

Hannans continued that while there is an expected increase in the district’s Education Cost Sharing (ECS) and Alliance Grant Funding for fiscal year 2025, the state’s Covid ESSER funds will sunset this September and ​“our cost are still going up.” 

Hannans and Negrón told the 20 attendees on Tuesday that ECS funding is based on student enrollment before Oct. 1 and therefore the hundreds of students that arrive to New Haven mid-year are not factored into state allocations. 

This also means that as the district hits that fiscal cliff, it will return back to having to work with an estimated $97.6 million of grant funds which was a norm pre-covid, but is more than $100 million less than what the district has had to work with over the past four years. 

Hannans concluded that the district walked into a known deficit this fiscal year because its ​“keep the lights on budget” was approved for $3.8 million less than requested. The same will be true if the district’s full budget request isn’t approved this year, too. 

“We’re not asking for an increase, we’re asking for status quo,” NHPS Business Director Christine Bourne added. 

Preventative Maintenance, Please

Ramos said her daughter, who is a sophomore at High School in the Community (HSC), spent her freshman year with a lack of support staff due to vacancies and now often comes home telling her about neglected bathrooms and other areas of the school building. She detailed sinks with no levers to turn on or off the water and winters being too cold and summers being too hot in the building. 

She pleaded for money in the budget to be designated to HSC and other schools that have been neglected in maintenance all while the district invested in building brand new schools in the past. ​“The new schools are given money but others are marginalized,” she said.

In response Negrón told Ramos she agreed that facility maintenance must be a priority for NHPS going forth. She said preventative maintenance plans need to be created. 

She added that more than half of the new budget request, which marks an 8 percent increase of the current year’s budget, is made up of contractual requirements like built-in educator pay increases. But to address concerns like Ramos’, the finance team cut some service budgets by 3 percent to allow for a total of $2.4 million to be included in the 24 – 25 request for new proposed items by the superintendent. No cuts will be made to budgets for instructional supplies, utilities, and maintenance. 

The $2.4 million would put $682,000 toward the exact issues Ramos mentioned. 

Negron said this budget, if approved, would allow the district to get more security and maintenance workers for school, and create a preventative approach to facility maintenance to invest in unaddressed building concerns that were neglected before she arrived. 

She added that the district only has three carpenters and one painter for all of its 41 schools. 

“Those are investments that we have to make,” Negrón said. ​“Just because we are in a city, it does not mean that it has to be less than.” 

Negrón added that she plans to address school maintenance needs with an equitable lens that does not prioritize certain schools over others. ​“There hasn’t been a budget to be able to do the capital improvements that we are speaking about,” she said. 

The district recently conducted a capital report, Negrón said, to check in on facilities. That study found that 39 of the district’s 41 buildings need major renovations. 

Now her team is tasked with playing catch up. It first needs the funds to do so. 

Ramos concluded that she wants a better managed budget that doesn’t prioritize creating new schools but instead reinvests in existing schools that have been neglected for years. Negrón agreed.

"Right-Sizing" Classrooms; No School Closures Imminent

Another parent who attended Tuesday’s forum, former Annex alder candidate Camille Ansley, said she believes NHPS is creating its own problems by taking away small classes. This in turn, she believes, will burn out educators and ultimately could create more vacancies by causing teachers to leave if overburdened. 

Negrón responded that upon her arrival last summer, she spent her first months touring the district’s buildings to learn about each schools needs. One key issue she learned about affecting several schools was the uneven distribution of educators and class sizes amongst schools. 

She said, for example, while one school had three small fourth grade classrooms each with certified teachers, another school had not one certified fourth grade teacher. This resulted in her beginning a ​“right-sizing process” that aims to prioritize equipping schools with their necessary educators rather than creating smaller classrooms that take up more staff in one place. 

Negrón said that while she would like to have small classes throughout the district, the issue becomes that small classrooms create a need for more certified teachers during a national teacher shortage.

“The reality is the funding that we would need for that we don’t even have to keep the lights on,” she said. 

Negron added that the district is working on alternative solutions to the shortage like its recent investment with ESSER dollars of paying the tuitions for 66 paraprofessionals to go to Southern Connecticut State University to get certified in teaching. 

“I’ve been looking at everything,” she said. 

She told the community that she has gone from school to school and department to department asking questions about job descriptions and staff evaluations with the goal of ​“maximizing our resources.” After the right sizing process, Negrón said, she will next examine ways to save money by cutting bus routes. 

One attendee suggested NHPS consolidate its schools. Ramos said she would support that idea to allow for small schools to be bridged together to maximize dollars. 

Negrón said she does not plan to close any schools this coming school year but ​“if we get there, I will be sure to talk with the community first.”