Marty Walsh's spending priorities: Austerity for Boston schools

Boston is 48th out of 231 districts but that is just raw data and it is not taking need into account. What I mean by that is that BPS pays more based on the tier of student. All districts do. So BPS spends relatively little for a General Ed English Speaking student. It is something like $5,000. It is more for Inclusive Special Education, then Sub Separate Education. The most expensive is Out of District Special Ed students. ELL students are also tiered.

So you have a town like Milton only spending $15,000 but that is also a reflection of the needs of their students.

that you are unintelligent. but sometimes you either do not bother thinking things through, or just don't care to when you feel it fits the narrative you're trying to construct.

im going to make a really dumbed down analogy here. if my son timmy, resident of weston, gets three square meals a day and i fund his extracurricular activities and he has a private tutor to make sure he can pass his math class, the odds are that his school won't have to.

if my son jimmy, resident of mattapan, doesn't get the nutrition, has little to no funding for extra curricular activity, and the tutor is me at 10 pm after i get home from work (and maybe i'm not so great at the subject either?), the school will probably have to spend more.

you can change the variables to whatever but i think you understand the logic?

that being said i have no particular interest in saving the children, i think humanity would be much better off if people stopped having them.

Stevil, what took you so long?

Now, I understand that you don't care. That's your prerogative. But it has been 3 years of budget deficits resulting in 180 million dollars in cuts from our schools.

Yes, a billion dollars is a big number. But is it a reasonable number? The average that towns and municipalities spend on their school district in MA is 53%. BPS spends 40%. We are way below average and we are a high need district. We are a wealthy city that is refusing to fund the schools.

Again, I understand you don't care. But I've been talking to you about this for 3 years now. 3 years of no supplies, and teachers being fired and deferred maintenance. And the school children have a right under the MA constitution to an appropriately funded education.

You don't believe it but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.

A few thoughts here. I've read your comments but I'm replying to your top level post just for readability. First, as for taking a deep look at the budget, I would encourage you to look not only at the city budget but also at the BPS budget department's first presentation to the school committee from December.

I realize that you may not consider this to be an unbiased document, but I don't see any reason to doubt the specific dollar figures they cite (although of course you are free to doubt the value and/or wisdom of the planned expenditures). Perhaps you'll be amused to see that on slide 8 they actually put the word "cuts" into quotation marks. Here are some quick observations:

• Slide 13 might be the best breakdown you'll see of where the $1B actually goes. Personally, I'd love an interactive version of this chart that lets you dig in deeper and lets you do things like highlight by various categories, but even as-is it's a pretty interesting read.
• The chart on slide 14 is a little bit subtle - I thought at first the grants were just overlays on the previous chart, but in fact it reflects a bigger total dollar figure. It's interesting to flip back and forth between slides 13 and 14 and see which columns get wider due to grant funding - mostly school services budgeted centrally and central administration. That's kind of too bad, because in my opinion it would be nice if more grant funding made it down to the individual schools, where most of the pain is being felt each year.
• Slides 15-17 show what the actual drivers of the cost increases are. Don't look at the transportation section of slide 15 without also looking at slide 16. Out of $162.4M in cost increases, there was:
  • $22.6M in SPED-related transportation costs
  • $25M in Bilingual/SEI education costs
  • $47M in Special education costs

  That's over $90M out of the $162.4M just to support ELL & SPED. Surprisingly (to me at least), benefits costs have only grown at 1.3% annually in the last 5 years.

• Slide 18 basically verifies your observation that the number of BPS employees has not really declined.
• On slide 20 you can see the specific cost reductions that have been made the last two years.

One of the big takeaways here should be that on slide 20, BPS notes that school budgets have "only" gone down $3.8M in the last two years. This is the big disconnect between your top-down view of the budget and parents' bottom-up look at it - you see the budget increasing every year, and parents see their school budgets decreasing even as costs are rising. The cuts that parents see aren't an illusion, they're really happening.

Now, I suppose I still haven't really addressed your main point, which is that the city spends a lot of money - and more every year - on BPS, and yet the budget still feels really tight every year, even as the school population is decreasing a little bit. And in some ways you're right - I'm sure that there are ways that BPS is spending its money unwisely. It's important to remember, though, that BPS has a high budget for a reason. Between its student demographics and the cost of living here (our teachers have high salaries in part because it's expensive to live here), Boston has the highest per-pupil foundation budget (that's the minimum amount that the state thinks the city should spend on education) in the state. We do overspend the foundation budget by a fair amount - 22% in FY14, in fact - and that amount far outpaces what a district like Lawrence or Lynn can afford. But we shouldn't be aiming for the kinds of budgets that Lawrence and Lynn have. A few other people here have quoted Tracy Novick, an education advocate from Worcester who knows much more about school finance than either of us, as pointing out that Boston can afford to fund its schools. And based on the raw numbers I've posted, I see why you would argue that we already do. Here's another thing that I've learned from Tracy, though: the current foundation budget formula drastically underestimates both the cost of things like health insurance and - crucially for Boston - special education, which have risen significantly statewide since the last time the foundation budget formula was last changed. In fact, she suggested to me that the preliminary recommendations from the Foundation Budget Review Commission might suggest an increase to Boston's foundation budget of 20% or more. If the recommendations are adopted, I think it will dramatically change the way we view the funding of every school district in the state, especially those districts like Boston with large special education expenditures.

Bottom line: Yes, the BPS budget is big, and I'm sure it is wasteful in some ways, and I'd love to see some serious efforts to reduce that waste. I think the school department really is struggling to deal with enrollment issues - for better or worse there are a lot of stubborn fixed costs in the way that BPS is structured - and that's driving up our per-pupil costs. But please do not underestimate the actual costs of running a district like Boston's.

"Fully fund our schools".

One more question for anyone who cares to answer - the city budget is a zero sum game. Give to the schools - take from somewhere else. Where do you cut?

Or - in the alternative - you can raise taxes - what's left that does or doesn't move that they haven't taxed?

He doesn't want to understand. He wants to concoct an alternative reality with an alternative budget that makes sense to him but doesn't square with the reality of school finances. And if anyone presents data you don't like - they're lying.

You can't just pretend like costs don't exist because they you've decided that they aren't ok with you.