After disappointment, school advocates in Central Mass. regroup for renewed push on funding reform
By
Scott O’Connell
Telegram & Gazette Staff
Posted Aug 25, 2018 at 7:47 PM
The start of the school year brings new
beginnings for students and school staff across the region. But for
those watching public school budgets, it’s just the same old story after
a summer of disappointment.
After ending
last school year with optimism that the Legislature was on the brink of
finally passing a bill that would update the state’s school funding
formula, public education advocates watched that legislation collapse in
conference committee earlier this month.
As
a result, school officials around the state will resume what has now
become an annual campaign to get the state to fix the formula, with even
greater urgency than before. At the same time, some districts, fed up
with what they consider to be a lethargic response from the state
government on the issue, are also mounting a possible legal challenge
aimed at forcing the state to increase funding to schools.
Despite this summer’s failure, however, advocates for the issue believe their efforts to this point have not been in vain.
“Even
though the bill failed, we have made progress,” said Lisa Guisbond,
executive director of Citizens for Public Schools, a statewide
organization that’s been on the forefront of the push to change the
funding formula. “We’ve really moved the needle.”
Progress hasn’t come easy, though. For years now, districts have been pushing the state to update the now decades-old formula.
For
urban, rural and other nonwealthy districts, state funding is the
lifeblood of their operating budgets, as they can’t rely on their local
tax base to generate enough revenue to keep up with their rising costs.
But school officials in those communities say the formula the state uses
to calculate how much annual aid it provides no longer accurately
reflects the true cost of educating their current students, particularly
as poverty, language needs and special education tuitions increasingly
push up their expenses.
“We’re just
providing the basics,” said Worcester Public Schools Superintendent
Maureen Binienda, whose district struggles every year to put together
much more than a level-service budget. “Right now, we’re only scratching
at the surface of the opportunities we get.”
Even this year, she said, which was a
comparatively successful budget year for Worcester, considering a late
influx of state funding over the summer allowed it to create dozens of
new positions, the schools are still not able to afford truly innovative
programs. Project Lead the Way, a specialized science curriculum used
by several schools in the district, costs between $30,000 and $40,000
per school each year, Ms. Binienda said, which is beyond the district’s
reach to afford a wider rollout.
At the
Quaboag Regional Schools, Superintendent Brett Kustigian said there’s
also not much left to cut, which is why he believes there is an urgent
need to fix the formula and provide some relief.
“We’ve
picked apart our budget,” he said, after years of minimal funding
increases. “It’s getting to the point where we’re bare bones.”
Parents
and students across the region, meanwhile, are noticing deficiencies at
their schools that can be traced to lack of funding. Some said they’re
being asked to buy more and more supplies over the last few years, for
example, in part because the district can’t provide them.
“Honestly,
it’s a lot of money,” said Stefani Tubert, a mother of triplets in the
Worcester schools, as she loaded her car with shopping bags outside the
Target at Lincoln Plaza last week. “I just dropped $300, mostly on
school supplies.”
Other parents said the
lack of resources at their schools to some degree obstructs their
involvement in their kids’ education. Erica Rose and her daughter,
Jillian, who is going into eighth grade this year, said in Paxton
they’ve found their school’s math classes don’t even have enough
textbooks to go around.
“I think the
biggest thing is not having the books to come home with,” Ms. Rose said,
adding it makes it more difficult for her to help her daughter with
homework.
There’s also a lack of critical people in the schools these days, some parents said.
“We don’t have a librarian (at our school),” said Ann Marie Mruczek, a parent from Holden. “I’d love one.”
While
an immediate solution was far-fetched, given the extreme cost to the
state to completely revamp the formula – up to $2 billion – the
Legislature seemed to be ready this year to begin working toward that
goal. A bill passed by the Senate earlier this year promised to, over
several years, adopt changes to the funding formula that were
recommended back in 2015 by a special commission tasked with analyzing
the state’s school aid mechanism.
But the
subsequent House version of the bill backed off from committing to what
some public school advocates viewed as critical pieces of that overhaul:
funding English-language learners and low-income students. State Sen.
Harriette L. Chandler, a Democrat from Worcester, said that difference
was ultimately what sunk a compromise bill this summer.
“We
just had two very different approaches to how to fund education,” she
said, adding she views the inclusion of ELLs and low-income students in
the bill as critical. “There was a fundamental disagreement there.”
Tom
Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School
Superintendents, said lawmakers probably also just “ran out of time”;
the conference committee tried to hash out an agreement on a bill right
up until the end of the formal session.
The
Legislature’s failure to come up with a bill was a heavy blow to school
officials, lawmakers, and others who had been expecting at least some
funding agreement to materialize from those meetings.
“The superintendents were very disappointed,”
Mr. Scott said. “They fully anticipated, when it went to conference
committee, something would come out.”
Instead,
Mr. Scott said his membership is now regrouping, with the aim of once
again putting pressure on lawmakers to get a bill passed next session.
“I
think it’s through the Legislature,” he said, where they’ll have the
best chance of getting a victory. “That’s where we’ll spend most of our
time and conversation.”
While the state’s
urban and rural districts are especially interested in seeing the
formula updated – and forming coalitions to better coordinate and
amplify their messaging to the state – Mr. Scott added it’s really the
entire public education system that’s behind the effort.
“The
vast majority of superintendents believe this is essential,” he said.
“Not because they will all benefit, but because they believe there’s a
moral imperative.”
Joseph Sawyer,
superintendent of the Shrewsbury schools, admitted, for instance, that
his district wouldn’t benefit right away from an overhaul of the
formula. But he supports the superintendents association’s campaign
nonetheless.
“I think it’s important the
commonwealth meet its obligation to all students, regardless of their
ZIP code,” he said. “Everyone benefits when school districts are strong
in all communities.”
It’s not just school administrators who are
seeing an urgent need for change, either. Roger Nugent, president of the
Educational Association of Worcester, said the funding formula dilemma
“is really our issue for the coming fall,” adding union members plan to
participate in demonstrations, talk to families and take other steps to
further the campaign to fix the formula.
Jack
Foley, vice chairman of the Worcester School Committee, which has been a
vocal part of that campaign, said elected school officials will need to
continue their advocacy, as well – “at the end of the day, we have some
support in the Senate, and from a lot of people in the House,” he said.
“I think there’s a strong coalition of people that are ready to come
together” to continue to push the Legislature to action.
But communities also have a backup, in case those efforts fail to gain traction again, he pointed out.
Some
school officials see a lawsuit against the state as a proven means to
achieve school funding equity. After all, a previous legal challenge
aimed at getting the state to meet its constitutional obligations to
students helped spur Massachusetts to pass landmark education reform in
1993.
But after lots of talk and ramped-up
expectations this summer that Worcester and Brockton specifically, which
have led the effort, would get a suit going, no such action seems close
at hand.
Worcester Mayor Joseph M. Petty, who a few months ago had
hoped to have a definitive plan for filing a suit by this month, on
Thursday said the city was “still discussing strategy how to proceed,”
and had not yet even hired a lawyer.
Mr.
Scott said going through the courts to achieve a formula fix is
something MASS is considering – several lawyers have already volunteered
to help lead a case pro bono – but “that’s certainly not our first
priority,” he said, noting a legal challenge would likely be a
time-consuming and drawn-out approach.
Ms.
Chandler said she’s still confident the Legislature will take care of
the issue when lawmakers return to Beacon Hill in January.
“Clearly we have a bill,” she said. “I think it’s one of the first things we need to do.”
Scott O’Connell can be reached at Scott.O’Connell@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottOConnellTG
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