Aside from restricted Alliance grants, the state’s funding has been flat for most of the decade.
After back-to-back years of budget slashing, New Haven’s Board of Education concluded it has built up enough trust in its financial management to ask for a $12.5 million increase in funds for next school year — and is taking its case directly to the public.
Board members are planning to join school administrators on a seven-stop tour of the city’s community management teams, where they’ll take their case to the voters that, after years of flat-funding public schools, it’s time for the State Capitol and City Hall to kick in more money.
Board members took an early look at that pitch — and offered pointers on how to refine it — at a three-hour Finance & Operations Committee meeting Monday evening at the district’s Meadow Street headquarters.
Over the last two years, the school board has closed three schools, vacated almost all of its rented space, ended after-school programs like Project Pride, sent administrators back to classrooms, laid off two dozen school counselors and library media specialists, and left even more positions vacant.
Christopher Peak Photo
CFO Phillip Penn: Looking for 10M bucks to keep schools open.
Darnell Goldson, one of the board’s two elected members, has said repeatedly this year that there’s not much else to cut and that the district needs new revenue.
He has compared New Haven’s per-pupil spending to wealthy suburbs like Darien and New Canaan, which spend thousands more on each kid, to say that the district is being short-changed. Making an argument that’s increasingly well-established by research, he’s said that if the city wants to achieve the same results, it needs more money.
Parents from the NHPS Advocates, a watchdog group that butted heads with board members over contracts early on, have joined in calls for more state support. They’re planning to ask state legislators to study the true cost of a public education and loosen Alliance grant requirements to spend on “innovation.”
“It doesn’t actually take that much to address [wasteful spending in a bureaucracy]. It takes a vigilant government and public, and you start to see those issues resolved. We’ve seen a lot of progress, just in two years,” said Sarah Miller, one of the group’s organizers, who also co-chaired Mayor Justin Elicker’s transition team. “The need is urgent and immediate.”
Darnell Goldson: We need a legislative agenda.
How much does New Haven need?
Phillip Penn, the school district’s new chief financial officer, said that it will cost a projected $199 million to keep the schools running next year with no new spending, in what he called a “lights-on” budget.
“We don’t change staff; we don’t change programs. We come in at August 2020 and start exactly where we are today. It will take $199 million to do it,” Penn said.
That would mark a $10.8 million increase over this fiscal year’s approved budget, although more than half of that comes from a projected $5.9 million deficit. It also includes a contractual three-percent raise for teachers, inflation for supplies and equipment, built-in increases for busing and other contracts, and rising tuition for special-education out-placements, Penn said.
Matt Wilcox, the school board’s vice president, pointed out that wouldn’t even make up all the cuts in recent years.
“It’s locking in a lot of these difficult situations,” Wilcox said.
He suggested that Penn spell out exactly how many positions had been lost in every school as part of their funding pitch.
NHPS
Next year’s costs will go up by nearly 10 million dollars.
Penn said that New Haven has been hurt by “some chronic underfunding over the years,” even as its students’ needs have grown.
Based on inflation alone since 2012, the district should have received an additional $35 million from the state in Education Cost Sharing funds, he said; instead it has been flat-funded, with barely half that in restricted Alliance funds to make up the difference.
With the city’s share added in, he continued, the school district should have received $210.8 million to spend this year — more than $10 million above what it’s asking for.
“The easy answer is that they’re mismanaging funds; it’s not. The funding has not kept up, even with inflation, under that time. That’s the true reality we’re operating under,” Penn said. “What do you actually pull back? We’ve cut those things to bare-bones minimums. There’s not a whole lot left that’s discretionary. We can’t say, ‘Stop buying pencils and paperclips,’ anymore.”
Christopher Peak Photo
Board members review budget documents at Monday’s meeting.
Penn also proposed $1.7 million in new spending on what he termed necessities.
He said the district needs a few new instructors: two and a half bilingual teachers for English learners ($142,000) and six health teachers for a new state-mandated curriculum ($340,000). He also suggested hiring a professional grant writer who could apply for money from foundations ($90,000),
He said the district needs to replace outdated textbooks and software: a new elementary-school math curriculum to replace the one going out of print ($500,000) and a one-time data-conversion fee to consolidate all its licensed student databases ($30,000).
And he said the district needs a real plan to keep up its buildings: a consultant’s long-term facilities plan for which schools to keep open for how long ($80,000), a facilities director who can institute a preventive-maintenance plan ($95,000), and money to make those ongoing repairs that can’t be bonded out, especially for heating and cooling systems ($450,000).
“Right now, we basically spend $575,000 on building maintenance,” Penn said. “That number is the same that I used to spend on four buildings [in Canton]; you’ve got 41.” He added that the district could be spending up to $4 million a year in maintenance, based on depreciation of its $2 billion footprint.
Goldson asked Penn to check out how much neighboring school districts are asking for in their next budget to give a comparison. “Everybody’s asking for more,” he said.
Penn said that the district might be able to pay for some of that additional $12.5 million in new spending on its own with more budget cuts.
He said that the district can look into shrinking staffing costs through attrition by not hiring replacements for teachers who leave, or at least at the same high salaries; reducing the number of school buses; negotiating furlough days with the unions; consolidating facilities; reducing workers’ compensation claims; and identifying new revenue streams, particularly from foundations.
After some board members said they might not be able to get behind additional staff reductions and school closures, Yesenia Rivera, the board’s new president, said she’d likely convene a special meeting later this month to vote on the plan’s details.
The schools are scheduled to take their presentation out to community forums on Feb. 4, Feb. 7, March 3, and April 21, and they plan to firm up more dates soon.
(UPDATE: School administrators say they plan to attend the following community management team meetings: February 12, 6:30 PM, Westville/West Hills at Mauro-Sheridan School Cafeteria; February 19, 6:00 PM, Hill South at Betsy Ross School Café; February 20, 6:00 PM, Dixwell at 230 Ashmun Street; March 3, 6:00 PM, Quinnipiac at 63 East Grand Haven (St. James Church); March 5, 6:00 PM, Fair Haven at Fair Haven Library; March 24, 6:00 PM, Newhallville at Lincoln Bassett School; April 21, 6:00 PM, Downtown/Wooster at City Hall’s Meeting Room 2.)
Please make all the spreadsheets with all the details available to the public.
Dennis Serfilippi
[Chris: For now, <a href="/archives/upload/2020/02/Chris/Budget_Presentation_02-03-2020.pdf">you can download a copy of the initial presentation here</a>. It looks a little screwy, because I had to convert it to a different file type.]