Mona Mahadevan photo
City teachers union prez Leslie Blatteau (right) and other protesters lead school-funding sit-in at guv's office in May.
(Opinion) From protests at the state capitol to marches in the streets to students themselves taking the lead in lobbying lawmakers for increased funding, plugging the New Haven Public Schools deficit has been a priority for a coalition of parents, students and the New Haven Federation of Teachers.
In addition to the matter of budgetary amounts, another issue is how the budget is spent. We don’t mean this solely in terms of lack of budgetary transparency, but also who is actually making budgetary decisions that impact the learning conditions of our children, and the working conditions of teachers and school staff.
Rather than leaving it up to opaque processes and removed decision-makers, we have a viable tested alternative: Participatory Budgeting, or “PB”, a process where people themselves decide how to spend a budget by first making proposals; then assessing and vetting those proposals; arranging them on a ballot; and then having the wider community vote on which projects should be implemented. We believe participatory budgeting should be deployed district-wide in New Haven Public Schools, putting decision-making power in the hands of the wider community.
School PB has been found to increase financial literacy among students; improve self-esteem and build connective tissue that addresses social isolation of children; and develops civic and project management skills. This is the kind of hands-on, real world, project-based learning that not only engages and inspires our students but also improves attendance, a continued goal for our school communities in New Haven.
Furthermore, PB can enhance our efforts to support community schools in our city. We envision community schools as places where we “identify programs and work together to find solutions” to generate real solutions for kids and communities. PB in schools takes the concept of community schools one step further: teachers and parents become a part of a process where students and the entire community dream up, logistically and financially vet, and then vote on how they want to strengthen and remake the very conditions of their own learning through real power over real money.
Mayor Justin Elicker himself championed participatory budgeting in 2013, stating that PB enables residents to be “living what’s in budget so they are the ones prioritizing how the city uses the money.” Mayor Elicker’s transition team in 2019 – 2020 released a list of recommendations and proposals that included introducing participatory budgeting. Now is as good a time as any to introduce PB in New Haven Public Schools.
Last month, the town of Hamden chose to empower parents and students to decide how over $169,000 should be spent in Hamden Public Schools through participatory budgeting. In Phoenix Public Schools, PB is used to allocate $1.2 million per year, with students, parents and school staff all having a vote over concrete projects ranging from library upgrades and community gardens to lab equipment and socio-emotional learning projects.
If our neighbors in Hamden and distant cousins in Phoenix can empower students and parents to decide how money is spent in their own schools across their school districts, then why can’t New Haven?
We are here to say that New Haven can and should do this. In fact, a piloting of school PB was already conducted here in New Haven at Augusta Lewis Troup School. New Haven has the preexisting infrastructure to scale district-wide through the Comer Model-based School and Planning Management Teams (SPMTs). Where SPMTs are strong, they would be natural immediate stewards for a school PB process. Where SPMTs need a kickstart, PB could be a means of revitalization.
New Haven once was a pioneer in participatory democratic schooling. Today New Haven can apply the tried and true model of participatory budgeting now used in over 1,000 public schools in Portugal; more than 7,000 town, city, school, and other types of PB processes elsewhere in the world; empowers students and parents in public schools across the United States; is now being implemented by our neighbors in Hamden, Connecticut; and was once championed by Mayor Elicker.
Participatory budgeting is a must for New Haven public schools.
Leslie Blatteau is President of the New Haven Federation of Teachers and a New Haven Public Schools parent. Alexander Kolokotronis is a New Haven resident and wrote his PhD dissertation at Yale University on the history of union-community collaborations and participatory democratic initiatives in New Haven Public Schools.