Barnard Principal Mike Crocco and Assistant Principal Yolanda Jones-Generette.
Barnard school has one assistant principal with a salary over $100,000; King/Robinson has two. Those numbers emerged in a new budgeting system that for the first time illuminates how the school district spreads $321 million among its 47 schools.
Barnard Environmental Studies Magnet School, where students (in video) learn about sustainable food using their own garden, was held up as one of the first examples Monday night as the Board of Education got a first look at the new way of budgeting.
Chief Operating Officer Will Clark shared Barnard’s budget for 2010-11 and 2011-12 with school board members, along with the budgets of the King-Robinson International Baccalaureate School and Hill Regional Career High School. The document is a draft with unaudited numbers.
The document shows a new way of budgeting that sheds much more light on what resources are going to each school, part of the city’s new school reform effort. Read the document here.
2 Schools, 2 Budgets
The document gives a glimpse of how the new system will work: For each school, a cover page gives an overview of student performance, demographics, and the school budget. Initial numbers from two magnet schools show some differences in how schools are spending their dough.
Barnard and King/Robinson, both interdistrict magnet schools, serve a similar number of kids in grades pre‑K to 8. The salaries, listed for all staff by name, detail the experience level of the teachers and administrators.
Barnard Principal Mike Crocco, who has 10 years experience, is making $126,259 this year. King/Robinson’s Iline Tracey, who has 26 years in the district, makes $130,480.
Barnard has one assistant principal, Yolanda Jones-Generette, who makes $108,942 this year.
King/Robinson has two assistant principals, George Flanagan, who makes $111,077; and Shanta Morrison Smith, who makes $104,498. Smith’s salary is paid for by part of an $8.3 million education jobs fund grant through the federal stimulus bill; that money is due to expire in 2012.
For the first time, the budgets show how much each school spends per student.
Barnard proposes spending a projected $4,357,772 on its 550 students. That’s $7,923 per kid.
King/Robinson, which has 557 students, proposes spending $4,711,620 next year, or $8,458 per child.
Does the district intend to make funding decisions based on the per-pupil spending at each school? Board member Alex Johnston asked. For example, after Baltimore switched to a school-based budgeting system, its principals now get money tied to how many kids they have enrolled on Oct. 1.
Clark said the district has not traditionally made decisions for school funding based on a funding-per-pupil basis, and does not plan to suddenly switch to that approach. Making per-pupil comparisons across schools can be tricky, he cautioned, because schools have different student populations, and are funded through different grants. He said the district will take its time to figure out what value the per-pupil analysis has.
While Barnard and King/Robinson are both magnet schools, their funding sources diverge: Barnard gets $1.1 million in interdistrict funds from the state, while King/Robinson gets $0.6 million. King/Robinson makes up that difference in special funds.
Their spending highlights some programmatic differences: Barnard budgeted $103 for travel next year; King/Robinson budgeted $23,000. Barnard spends $3,000 on field trips per year, while King/Robinson spends $18,000.
(In video: Barnard students take a culinary expedition right in their own classroom.)
Barnard has four full-time food service workers, while King/Robinson has six.
The new budget system also shows school how much they’re spending to heat and cool their buildings.
Barnard, which was designed as a “green” building and has solar panels on the roof, is expected to consume $60,028 in natural gas this year, compared to $51,751 for King/Robinson. Barnard is expected to pay $161,657 in electric costs, versus $196,612 for King/Robinson.
Clark said the new system of budgeting has been in the works for six to eight months. The new system aims to add transparency: PDFs of each school’s budget will be posted on the district website, he said.
Board member Selase Williams asked if the new system will change the way the district looks at budget cuts, as it enters a new fiscal year with a potential deficit of $13 million to $18 million. He asked if it would make sense to ask each principal to cut 10 percent of its budget.
Clark replied not. Some positions at schools are based on specific grants, so making cuts that way would not make sense, he said.
Schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo said he is enlisting principals in the budget-cutting effort, however. He said he has asked them to come up with a list of “what they could give up,” and has heard from several with suggestions.
The school-based budgeting is meant to coincide with the city’s reform drive, which gives principals extra autonomy and accountability over how they run their schools. The city is phasing in a new “portfolio management” approach, whereby high-performing schools get more autonomy and failing schools may be converted to charters, based largely on student performance on test scores.
“We’re not looking at schools as a district anymore,” said Mayo. “We’re looking at schools on an individual basis.”
The new way of budgeting, which has been in the works for six to eight months, represents a shift to “site-based” budgeting from a “centralized” model, said Clark.
This year’s budget gives only district-wide figures for spending on field trips or textbooks; it doesn’t name administrator salaries or break out how money is spent in each school.
All that is due to change soon: Clark said he plans to air a proposed budget, with a school-by-school breakdown, at the board’s next meeting on Feb. 14.
“Transparent” Budgeting?
Clark Monday night refused to share the document with the Independent despite distributing it at a public meeting to six board members, complete with a glossy cover, printed in color with pictures of smiling kids.
Despite claims of added transparency in the city’s school reform drive, Clark offered an argument for failing to to share the document that he invoked last year in a similar situation before being rebuked by the state Freedom of Information Commission. The Independent independently obtained a copy of the document Monday night.
After the Independent ran a story highlighting Clark’s refusal to obey Freedom of Information (FOI) law, Clark emailed the document to the Independent at 10:01 a.m. Tuesday. He wrote in his email that he considers himself to have satisfied an FOI request when, after he refuses to share a public document, a reporter obtains that document from someone else who does not work for the school district. “While I consider your request to me to have been fulfilled with your receipt of the document through a Board member, attached please find an electronic version,” Clark wrote.
The school-based budgeting is meant to coincide with the city’s reform drive, which gives principals extra autonomy and accountability over how they run their schools. The city is phasing in a new “portfolio management” approach, whereby high-performing schools get more autonomy and failing schools may be converted to charters, based largely on student performance on test scores.
In refusing to share the budget document Monday, Clark claimed it is a “draft.”
His refusal to share the document follows a pattern of closed-door budgeting: Last year, the school board approved a $324 million spending plan three days after seeing the proposal for the first time, and before the public even got a hint of what’s in it. Clark and other school officials were sentenced to open government training last year after losing a battle before the Freedom of Information Commission. The commission ruled last year that the district broke the law when Clark refused to share a copy of a list of schools where moves would take place, arguing that it was a “draft.”
Monday, Clark refused requests from the Independent and Register for the draft budget that he presented at that meeting. He said some of the salary figures may be off by as much as $10,000 and that an erroneous number might set off commenters reading the article. Freedom of Information law does not contain exemptions for officials’ fears that release of documents will prompt critical comments on a website.