There is so much to say about Farah Stockman’s recent opinion piece “A ‘starving’ school system” that I don’t even know where to begin. I will first start by disagreeing with the premise that $1 billion is the tipping point for public outrage. Recent studies have shown that increased school spending is linked to favorable outcomes, including higher graduation rates and lower poverty rates. An investment in our children now is an investment in our city’s future tomorrow.
BPS educates a diverse student population with significant challenges. Many positions require a teacher to have a Master's Degree and multiple licenses in General Education, Special Education and English Language Learning, pushing them into a higher pay grade. The cuts to our schools over the past several years mean that our teachers are lacking the supplies and supports their students need, from lost social workers and counselors to nurses. On top of classroom instruction, our teachers are crowdfunding supplies and field trips, managing conflict de-escalation, trauma counseling, and even administering first aid.
Last year, a Forbes article detailed all the different ways that Boston is one of the top 5 Most Overpriced Cities in the United States. Utilities are 23.4% higher than the national average, groceries are 14.5% higher, health care is 21.5% higher, transportation is 8.8% higher, and other various costs of living are 28.3% higher. The average BPS teacher salary in 2014 was $90,799 and the median salary for the Boston area residents is $87,317. It does not bother me one bit that our teachers make more than some of the national averages; their salaries are on par with the city’s average and our cost of living is significantly higher than the national average. Not only that, our salaries and benefits draw national talent to our school district, despite our aging school facilities.
The deep budget cuts we’re seeing on the school level again this budget cycle are rooted in rising district costs and chronic underfunding of known variables. In 2012, Mayor Menino signed a new 6 year contract with the BTU, and in 2013, he signed a new contract with bus vendor Veolia. The total rising costs are about $38 million in FY17, and BPS has identified about $8M in cost savings. The Mayor is seeking to expand K1 seats by 200 - 300 at an estimated cost of $4 million, which means Mayor Walsh’s $13.5 million increase is only $9.5 million. To state this another way, with Mayor Walsh's expansion of K1 seats, any allocation lower than $34 million (3.4%) causes a deficit and budget cuts.
A 3.4% increase would not be out of line with the two other large departments in the City of Boston. Also keep in mind that the total cost of $1.014 billion includes the cost of employee benefits, which have increased by 7% in the past 5 years to $146 million. All other City departments budget the cost of benefits centrally, outside of each department’s budget. So when you look at this chart below, keep in mind that the health care and benefits of Boston Fire and Boston Police are not included in these numbers. I don’t show this to you to pit teachers vs. police vs. firefighters; I show this to explain again that the rate of rising costs of the BPS budget is in line with other departments when you take into account the relative size and number of employees.
Am I rambling? Unfortunately I’m going to keep going.
The basic framework of school budget spending in Massachusetts is based on something called the Foundation Budget Formula. This formula, explained in this video, determines the amount required to provide an adequate education to the specific demographics in the student population. The formula has not been updated since 1993, so last year the Foundation Budget Formula Commission convened to re-evaluate it. The Commission’s report released in October 2015 revealed that the Foundation Budget dramatically underestimates school spending, especially when it comes to Special Needs, English Language Learners and the cost of health care. The Governor ignored these recommendations in his proposed FY17 budget. I know this is very complicated, but simply put: when the costs of SPED, ELL, and health care are funded at a dramatically lower rate than actual cost, that causes underfunding throughout an entire school system. So folks better get over this whole ONE BILLION dollar hysteria thing; when we actually start funding BPS properly it’s going to get a lot higher than that.
Inquiring neo-liberals want to know: Where can one find savings in this Cadillac sized budget? Okay, I’ll play this game for a few minutes.
Transportation: This is a $109 million dollar problem that no one can solve. I’m just going to throw some facts at you and you can come up with a plan. No one knows how many BPS kids actually take the bus. BPS wants to install tap card kiosks onto each bus to track children, but that costs money. They should just ask every school principal how many of their students are on the bus, because they have clipboards they use every morning to check kids in, but who likes common sense really? Each bus costs $90,000 per school per year, even if there’s only 5 kids on that big yellow school bus. A Manning parent once told me there are 13 buses serving their school of ~160 students. That's about $1.17 million in transportation costs for one school serving 160 students. I’m only half joking when I say each kid could get an Uber every day on a BPS credit card and that would be cheaper. Also state law mandates that BPS pays for the buses for all kids in the CITY from Kindergarten to 5th grade. It costs $14 million for charter school transportation and ~$1 million in private school and parochial school busing.
Asset management: I once got lost in a basement of a BPS high school on my way to a Citywide Parent Council meeting. Stacks of unused textbooks were being used as doorstops. Boxes and boxes of books and software sat there unused, unopened and definitely not inventoried. Computers and monitors were piled up. I happened to pull out my phone to snap a few pictures.
When it comes to asset management, no one is better than librarians, but unfortunately many of them are currently on the chopping block. We were hopeful this kind of waste of resources would be addressed in Mayor Walsh’s audit of BPS, but instead the audit was a thinly veiled plan to downsize our district based on incorrect metrics, with a whopping $660,000 price tag.
So I’ll stop here, even though I could go on and on and on and on in response to Ms. Stockman’s piece. To close, I would ask Ms. Stockman to think back to a teacher who inspired her to change lives with her words and taught her she was brave enough to travel to the world’s most dangerous places to find the truth. I would ask her to put a price tag on that. She asked, "If this is what starving looks like, where do I sign up?"
Sign up here: http://www.teachboston.org/
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EDIT March 1st, 2016
The morning after I published this piece, Ms. Stockman shared a link to my perspective with her followers on Twitter. It's this kind of sharing of ideas that will bring us to a compromise and help us find common ground. I would like to thank Ms. Stockman for her generosity.
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EDIT March 1st, 2016
The morning after I published this piece, Ms. Stockman shared a link to my perspective with her followers on Twitter. It's this kind of sharing of ideas that will bring us to a compromise and help us find common ground. I would like to thank Ms. Stockman for her generosity.
