Is Boston getting shafted on that state education stimulus or not?
By adamg - 3/20/09 - 6:11 am
This Globe story starts out by making it seem so - by stating that some Massachusetts communities, including Boston, aren't getting any money at all. But then you read to the bottom and you see a quote from a Menino mouthpiece:
Dot Joyce, a spokeswoman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino, did not express displeasure that Boston was passed over, and said she expects the city will receive $17 million for schools in later rounds of stimulus funding.
What might have also been helpful in the story was some specific examples of why, say, Wellesley, gets money but Hull doesn't, beyond a vague reference to "changes in student enrollment and demographics."
Comments
Boston is getting the big
Boston is getting the big doughnut, probably because the super-fast growing city (just ask the city's population estimators!) somehow manages to have rapidly declining k-12 enrollment.
here's the list, which to some extent looks quite random:
http://www.mass.gov/Agov3/docs/DistrictswithIncreasestoFoundation.pdf
looks to me like most of the state's poor houses are getting big wads (though not fall river).
List
Thanks for the link. Looks like Worcester, Brockton and Lawrence are going to get some much needed help.
Foundations...
The $168 million Deval offered up yesterday is only a small chunk of the federal money coming into the state for education funding. Mass. is slated for $1.88 billion over the next two years, and we're up for competitive grants on top of that.
Key quote
In other words, any town that was shafting their own students gets a bailout. If you were being a good doobie and funding your schools as required, well ha ha, sucker!
For informational fun, see the explanation of the formula and the further explanation (pdf), which links to a spreadsheet.