Markeshia Ricks Photo
Joyner raises concerns at 4-hour board meeting.
The Board of Education voted to ask the city for a raise, but dropped some of its its specific reasons.
It made that vote after a contentious, nearly four-hour meeting Monday night at the L.W. Beecher Museum School of Arts & Sciences.
Board members voted unanimously to ask for a $7.5 million increase the schools receive from the city in the upcoming fiscal year, which starts July 1— $187.5 million instead of the the $180 million the city contributes this year. (The overall Board of Ed budget, including funding from all outside sources, would come to $430.2 million.)
That $7.5 million increase was suggested by school district Chief Financial Officer Victor De La Paz.
But the board Monday night voted to strip a set of priorities De La Paz had proposed for how to spend that additional money and to scrap the use of a controversial new funding model for producing “equity” among city schools — at least until board members had a chance to discuss it in further detail.
De La Paz’s new “equity” model was questioned.
In a previous board meeting, held last week, De La Paz unveiled his suggested new budget for the next fiscal year. It not only outlined a $7.5 million increase above the $180 million the district received this year but called for using the new money to pay for six initiatives. Those initiatives included continuing Saturday reading and math academies and raising salaries for substitute teachers and for the district’s 500 paraprofessionals, who start out at $18,000 a year, an amount Mayor Toni Harp depicted as “slave wages.”
Newly elected board members Darnell Goldson and Ed Joyner both argued vehemently that De La Paz and Superintendent Garth Harries had made assumptions about priorities for the district without consulting the board, and now the board was being forced to make a decision without all the information they needed to make a decision.
Though they don’t get to vote, student board members Kimberly Sullivan and Coral Ortiz raised concerns about the district’s process for gathering formal feedback from individual schools about their needs and how a new funding model might impact the schools.
Harries pointed out that the process for the district’s budget was first outlined Feb. 1 including the need to provide a “bottom line” amount to ask of the city. He also said that the priorities that were outlined as the reason for the increase are needs that have been identified in the district for some time. (The Board of Ed submits its budget request to the city administration, which then submits an overall proposed budget to the Board of Alders. The Board of Alders then votes on the budget including the amount for the Board of Ed; it does not tinker with individual education line items.)
Joyner called the process “flawed.”
“What I’m hearing tonight are a lot of unanswered questions,” he said.
Board member Carlos Torre questions whether the district should seek more of an increase in funding from the city. “Will a $7.5 million increase cover every need we have,” he asked.
Harries said that the increase was considered “reasonably aggressive.”
De La Paz and Harries tried to reassure board members that they weren’t making a final decision on the detailed line items of district’s budget Monday night, but coming to consensus on how much to request from the city in time to forward a request to Mayor Toni Harp, who by mandate of the city’s charter must submit her proposed overall budget to the Board of Alders by March 1. They said the board would have nearly another month to put their stamp on the district’s final budget.
Harp urged the board to make its full ask, refrained from voting.
Harp, who also serves as the BOE president, mostly stayed out of the fray Monday night. She abstained from the vote, but encouraged her colleagues on the board to make a decision.
“If you don’t ask for enough or don’t ask for anything, it gets to be harder to argue that you need something when you had the opportunity to ask,” she said. “Your ask is your ask. That’s why I’m not voting. My decision is not your decision.”
Goldson ultimately made a motion to ask for the $7.5 million from the city, but without defining the priorities for the use of the money, and also eliminating a newly proposed funding model as a basis for distributing money to schools. Both he and Joyner said they don’t oppose raises for paraprofessionals, but they want more information on the justification for those raises and how they are weighed against the district’s 40 teacher vacancies.
Fellow board member Michael Nast made a friendly amendment to Goldson’s motion that prioritizes $5.5 million of the increase for the district’s increased costs and an additional $2 million for priorities to be set at a later date. He also suggested that the board hold a public meeting strictly to go over the budget.