Aliyya Swaby Photo
Chowdri: Better to have people angry about a known formula than about a lack of transparency in funding.
New Haven is considering a new way of allocating money to individual schools — which could mean having weighted funding follow individual students and establishing standard student-teacher ratios across the district.
A committee of nine people, including principals, parents and teachers, has worked on this model over the past several weeks — responding to public feedback that the current funding system is not equitable and not transparent.
A new model could standardize the ways in which each school is allocated money from the district, ensuring each has at least the minimum level of resources needed to teach students.
At the group’s fourth meeting, last Thursday at Metropolitan Business Academy, committee members disagreed on to what extent a baseline funding formula could establish equity between all the district’s schools, with some arguing it would not be flexible enough.
Victor De La Paz, the school district’s chief financial officer, said he believes a formula — or a set of formulas — would be the best option to be “consistent” in funding schools. “I’m trying to take what we have and distribute it as fairly as possible,” he said.
The current system is far from consistent and does not address student need. Inequity exists in funding across New Haven’s schools, and no one knows exactly why, according to a controversial study New Haven commissioned from not-for-profit Education Resource Strategies (ERS) last year.
In 2013 – 14, the highest-funded K‑8 school, Betsy Ross, received just under $16,000 per weighted pupil, more than twice what the lowest- funded K‑8 school, Bishop Woods, received that year, and way above the median $10,400.
High School in the Community and Hyde School are the high schools receiving the most resources and/or the most staff per students, while Engineering and Science University Magnet School and Hillhouse High School land on the other end of the graph. Smaller schools generally receive more weighted per pupil funding, while larger neighborhood schools receive less.
When presenting the results to the Board of Education in March, ERS representative David Rosenberg said that varying per-student funding across schools is good if it is deliberate and channels more resources into “needier schools.” He urged the district to build a funding model that “reflects its value system.”
That’s the current task of the “school funding committee” composed of a few district leaders, two parents, teachers union representative Tom Burns, and three principals — Wexler/Grant’s Sabrina Breland, Davis School’s Sequella Coleman, and Metro’s Judy Puglisi. With four meetings left, the committee has until Nov. 25 to come up with recommendations to get to Superintendent Garth Harries for next year’s budget process, who would then forward recommendations to the Board of Ed for consideration.
The committee considered a few models: a staffing model that would set a student-teacher ratio for all schools, a weighted student model that would fund students by need and have that money follow the student to any district school, and “something in the middle,” De La Paz said.
There was pushback against each model and each has its pros and cons, he said.
Weaker Schools Penalized?
Engineering & Science University Magnet School parent Jill Kelly said she is “nervous” about the weighted student model, because it is closest to a privatized “market-based model,” where parents “vote with their feet.” If enough parents decide not to send their students to a certain school, that school would lose most of its funding, leaving the remaining student body much worse off.
The model would provide more funding for English language learners and special education students, who generally need more resources in order to learn. Kelly (pictured) said she worries it would lead to an over-diagnosis of learning disabilities for the wrong reasons, because the diagnosis would be considered valuable to schools.
De La Paz said it would also be difficult, with this model, to “capture the adaptive needs” of schools, especially those with high rates of transience. The district would need to create a system to quickly adjust funding when schools gain new students mid-year.
The staffing model would establish a standard student-teacher ratio for the district, which would guarantee every school a “baseline” set of staff but also be relatively inflexible and not allow for smaller class sizes, De La Paz said. New Haven has in the past used a staffing model for some of its schools, but De La Paz was unable to find “policy or practice” to show how it was applied. “It was done on an as-needed basis.”
But this model would guarantee only teachers, not other resources.
“You still need a way to distribute equitable non-personnel resources to schools. Unless that’s need-driven, it will only perpetuate inequity,” he said.
At Thursday’s meeting, Principal Puglisi warned against “taking away choice to get to that average,” which would prevent high schools from offering electives and smaller classes as needed.
A “hybrid model” would merge the two imperfect models, setting aside money for a standard student-teacher ratio and using remaining available general funds for weighted student allocations at school level.
Maximum student-teacher ratios are now established in the teachers union contract. High school teachers cannot be assigned more than 125 students each year or more than five teaching periods per day, making the average student-teacher ratio 25:1. No individual class from grades K‑2 can have more than 26 students and no class from grades 3 – 12 can have more than 27 students. (Special education classes are regulated by state and federal law.)
De La Paz used an average student-teacher ratio of 25:1, which would cost around $109 million. Getting the average ratio down any lower would wipe out much of the operating fund, he said.
About $9.4 million would remain to be used for students at all 47 schools — once the staffing model, transportation, facilities and maintenance, central office staff, adult education, magnet operation, and special education tuition costs were subtracted from the total $227 million in education operating funds.
The model would weight students needs, including “academic support,” ELL and special education, to determine how much of the $9.4 million to give to each school.
De La Paz refused Thursday to compare how the hybrid model funds students and staffs schools to the current model, saying he did yet not have the exact comparable data. He said he would be able to make exact comparisons by the committee’s next meeting.
Interdistrict magnet schools are partially funded by the state based on enrollment numbers by Oct. 1. Their remaining budget comes from the district’s general funds, De La Paz said. With the hybrid model, some magnet schools would get less of the district’s general funds and some would get more, depending on their need.
Burns pointed out that some schools would be losing funding with any of these models. “You’re not going to have everyone saying yay,” he said. Some of the schools with above-median resources — most often magnet schools — would see some of that money allocated to lower-funded schools, most often neighborhood schools.
Siddhartha Chowdri (pictured at top right), the district’s school finance resident, said he would rather people disagree with a formula than accuse the district of being secretive on the way it allocates funding. “The changes don’t have to happen all at once,” he said.
Some committee members worried that any formula would be too strict. “I don’t think formulas guarantee equity,” Puglisi said.
Children Aren’t “Dollars”
Concerned that the models focused too much on numbers instead of people, Kelly designed a rough sketch to prompt the group to discuss the context behind the formulas.
“It’s an amateurish schematic designed to reorient our group’s thinking away from an economic reductionism that portrays children and teachers as dollars, schools as commodities, and parents as consumers. Instead I asked: if there’s not always enough money for everything, what real student needs absolutely must get addressed and in what order?” Kelly said.
Her pyramid is inexact and does not reflect the district’s funding sources — for example, school construction and maintenance is in a separate pool from the district’s general funds for schools. But Kelly said it helped them consider a “base that [schools] can’t do without and then work their way up.”
Puglisi and Kelly plan to talk with principals at each of the 47 schools before the next meeting to determine gaps in their staffing and other resources. They hope this “needs assessment” will help them figure out how to determine the baseline.
“The whole thing started based on the idea of equity without knowing the grounds of what it is today,” Puglisi said.
Burns agreed with the need to include all principals in the discussion and for committee members to “walk around the schools” to experience the extent of their need. Some schools do not have enough funding to stock paper and basic supplies.
“What is it unreasonable that you don’t have?” Kelly said she plans to ask principals.
She said she would favor “incrementalism,” adjusting the current system over time instead of wiping the slate and starting anew. “We should identify the abuses, the real inequities in the educational experience as opposed to just funding or staffing inequities,” she said. The ideal funding model “should be responsive and customizable rather than inflexible.”
De La Paz said he expects principals to say they want a maximum student-teacher ratio and extra funding for ELL and special education students, which will turn the committee back to the hybrid model.
Ultimately, the committee could end up with a few different formulas to apply to a few clusters of schools, grouping schools with similar levels of need to determine how they should be funded, he said. If the committee can’t agree on a formula, they can also decide to use $19 million in discretionary grants from the state Alliance Network and Priority School Program to plug the gap for the next fiscal year — giving schools with fewer resources “maximum access” to the grants. De La Paz said that doing nothing is not an option.
Of two schools with similar enrollment numbers, “Clinton Avenue School has much less than Barnard [Environmental Studies Magnet School]. Every day I don’t do something about that, I’m failing at my job,” he said.
The next committee meeting is Nov. 5 at 5:30 at Metro.