The School Budget
On March 3, 2009, the proposed 2009-2010 NPS budget was made available to the general public, in advance of its March 5th presentation to the School Committee by Superintendent Jeffrey Young. The numbers are hard to digest at first glance, but my overall reaction to the budget includes these points:
Reading the executive summary and other descriptive portions, there is not a single reference to the pending collective bargaining agreement. The elephant in the room. Yet there are specific strategies of staff cuts and reallocations across the board. How can a budget be established and voted on when a contract settlement is at best months away?
This appears to me to be a “steady as she goes” budget, apparently with a continuation of historic compensation policy and with no apparent acknowledgment of the radical rethinking going on in municipalities across the state and country, that include wage freezes, changing the insurance split, and joining the GIC (still waiting for numbers on this one) for starters. This budget is formed in a vacuum relative to community and national conversations.
What is the collective bargaining agreement presumed to generate these numbers? It cannot remain a secret. Can’t the NTA, reading through this budget and having access to recent budget personnel numbers, determine what contract settlement the NPS has assumed?
NPS would deserve accolades if they said “Here is the settlement agreement assumed for this budget. These are the outcomes that will result from this agreement. A different settlement will result in different outcomes.”
I would like to see a handful of contract choices, along with the associated budget outcomes that would follow. Offering real outcomes allows the community to weigh in honestly with their choices about what is most important to them. It allows the community to see what different compensation agreements will mean about their schools and the experience their children will have in school relative to class size, course selection, math coaches, social workers, etc. It allows honest, meaningful conversations about community values to take place. This is a very good thing.
As an example, a salary freeze will “yield” roughly $3.5 million dollars this year. A change in the insurance split from 80/20 to 70/30 will yield roughly $5 million dollars this year. Shifts within a range of $8.5 million dollars one way or another will completely change the nature of the budget for FY10. Admittedly these types of decisions will impact costs and burdens to teachers, but shouldn’t we all be able to discuss them, rather than having them discussed as a closed process within the SC and NPS? This year more than any in recent history, the process should be open because so many “constants” in our world are in flux.
(I wrote this on the Newton TAB blog on March 3, 2009. On March 5th, Jeffrey Young announced that the proposed budget assumed no cost-of-living adjustments for FY 2009-2010 (these are benignly identified as “negotiated increases” in the current contract).
Transparency | Steve | July 17, 2009
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