By Alain Jehlen

“Three years of cuts in a school, three years of cuts!” said School Committee member Miren Uriarte during the budget debate last March. “We need to, at some point, stop!”

The committee had heard from parents, teachers, and students about schools without librarians, nurses, and other critical staff, pleading that the cuts be restored, and Uriarte was far from the only member who was upset.

Member Jeri Robinson said that if students go to college lacking research skills because their school didn’t have a library program, “we’ve cheated them.”

In the end, the committee approved the budget 5 to 2, with Uriarte and Regina Robinson opposed. (Jeri Robinson answered the roll call with “Maybe” and then switched to “Yes.”)

Should every BPS school have a librarian? (Photo: Rawpixel, through 123rf.com)

But before the vote, four of the seven members said that, for future budgets, they wanted the School Committee to consider starting each school off with a basic set of staff and programs that any good school should have — including librarians. Those members were Alexandra Oliver-Davila, Hardin Coleman, Jeri Robinson, and Miren Uriarte. Others may also have been in favor but didn’t explicitly say so.

So…did that discussion happen? Apparently not. At least not at a School Committee meeting.

Should every BPS school have a science teacher? (Photo: Rawpixel, through 123rf.com)

At a meeting last November 15, responding to a comment from Jeri Robinson, BPS superintendent Tommy Chang said, “I’ve heard this theme come up from various sources…Is there that basic foundation that all schools need? We have yet to come up with a good way to have that conversation.”

“I’ve heard this from you and others repeatedly,” he added. “We will need to figure out how to have that conversation.”

Chang has said that he sees a conflict between providing a baseline instructional program at every school and letting principals decide how to spend their budgets.

How about a music program? (Photo: Antonio Diaz, through 123rf.com)

Under the current BPS system, each school is allocated $200,000 for a principal and an administrative support person. Some major costs, including transportation, are funded from the central office. But most of the money that a school can use to hire staff is derived from a “weighted student funding” formula.

The way the formula works is that each student comes with a certain amount of money. Some categories of students who need extra services come with more money — for example, students with disabilities and students who don’t speak English fluently. That’s the “weighted” part. (Click here for the weights.) The School Department uses an elaborate system of enrollment projections to come up with a budget for each school. Principals use the money to hire staff and cover other expenses.

(Just before the vote last March, School Committee chair Michael O’Neill proposed that the committee re-examine all the weights in September or October. Other members also suggested changes to the weights. But Chang recently told parent representatives that there have been no changes in the weights for the 2018–2019 budget.)

One advantage of having the money follow the students is that, theoretically, it should prevent politically connected schools from getting more than their fair share.

The problem is, the money doesn’t only pay for expenses that vary with the number of students. It also has to cover an art specialist, guidance counselors, custodians — and the librarian. If the school is small or its classes aren’t full to capacity, these school-wide services are on the chopping block.

Just before she voted against the budget, Uriarte described how a school can slide into a fatal downward spiral: “We have a declining enrollment that reduces the budget, a decline of services at the school level…and then parents make a choice that again affects the enrollment. So to me that’s a tremendously vicious cycle that we at some point have to break.”

Weighted student funding produced giant losses for some schools, giant gains for others, as BPS parents Bob Damon and Kristin Johnson showed in this chart posted on their blog. Some of the losses were restored before the budget was passed.

Often, the cycle is started off by a drop in the school’s rating from the state Department of Education. A low rating can scare parents away from a school.

The state ratings are mostly determined by test scores, which are closely tied to family income and to students’ fluency in English. So schools with shrinking enrollment tend to have more low-income students and more English learners than higher-rated schools.

Uriarte said cutting a school’s budget when the state gives it a lower rating means, “We’re making choices that…disadvantage schools that are particularly disadvantaged already. …[That] weighs really heavily on me.”

Meanwhile, the city is adding space for schools where more parents want to put their children. Often, that’s because the state has given a school a high rating, due to its test scores. For this year, BPS added space for 600 more students in schools with the state’s top two ratings.

Adding seats at schools that are popular may seem to make sense, but it has a disturbing side effect. As parent Megan Wolf pointed out to the committee, the result is fewer schools in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods and more schools in richer, whiter areas.

The Black Educators’ Alliance of Massachusetts was among those urging the mayor and School Committee to give every school the funds to provide a good education.

The Black Educators’ Alliance of Massachusetts (BEAM) told the Committee that “Instead of strengthening low-performing schools, the School Department is proposing to starve low-performing schools into academic failure.”

BEAM noted that it is official BPS policy that “All District policies, budgets, strategic plans and school improvement plans shall advance the goals of eliminating the opportunity and achievement gaps facing students of color…”

That can’t happen, BEAM said, unless “low-performing” schools get the budgets they need to improve.

Before the final budget was approved, the BPS administration reported they had set up a special fund of $1.25 million to restore some of the cuts at 15 schools with low state ratings and falling enrollment.

Jeri Robinson also asked, in the future, for a budget that showed what it would actually cost for each school to offer a quality education. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a budget that reflects really what it takes to educate the students that we have,” she said.

“What would you do with that information?” asked O’Neill.

He said he’s all in favor of lobbying the legislature for more revenue for the city, but in the absence of more money, the superintendent’s job is to do the best he can with the money the mayor makes available, and the committee’s job is to decide whether the superintendent did that.

The Committee took no action on Robinson’s suggestion.

But BPS officials did take note of the anger over last year’s cuts. BPS chief financial officer Eleanor Laurans gave the committee a preview of next year’s budget on December 13 — the same night that dozens of parents expressed their fury over the proposal for radical changes in school start times. Laurans said principals would receive their budgets later that week.

“Where do you anticipate the howls coming from?” asked vice-chair Hardin Coleman. He explained he meant: Who would be saying, “Oh my God! What am I going to do?”

Laurans said that the budget would include more special funds for schools suffering cuts under the weighted student funding formula, as well as an appeals process so principals will have a way to try to get back some of the money they lose.

But she said, “We have set up a system that embraces school choice…and that means that we have some schools that are growing and some schools that are shrinking. …We’re trying to learn from the feedback we got last year and soften the transitions, but what we’ll be proposing to you in February does not mark a complete departure from the principles that underlie how we allocate money to schools.

“And I want to be clear: This will be a significant investment — it won’t erase the problem.”

Jeri Robinson said there had been productive meetings between the budget writers and a Budget Equity Working Group that includes representatives of BEAM and the NAACP, among others, with the goal “not to end up in a situation like we did last year with concerns about the equity issues.”

Committee chair O’Neill said it would be “critical” when the principals got their budgets that they be told at the same time about “soft landing” funds for schools with declining enrollment and about the appeals process. “Please! Communicate with them up front,” he said.

To which Laurans replied, “That’s great advice and we will do that.”