Don't Hold Your Breath!

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