Aliyya Swaby File Photo
Schools CFO De La Paz.
The Board of Education is seeking a $415 million budget for the next fiscal year — which would include a 3.2 percent increase in city funding, the first such increase in two years.
Victor De La Paz (pictured at a committee meeting last week), the district’s chief financial officer, broke down the numbers for members of the Board of Education Monday night, explaining preliminary cost increases, new investments and plans for saving money. It also assumes that the state will pull back some of its money for local schools.
The board approved the preliminary budget request. It will vote on a final detailed budget by late April, just before the document is presented to the Board of Alders April 29.
It is unclear whether any increase in city money is in the cards. The city flat-funded the school budget last year. Mayor Toni Harp has been urging her department heads to prepare budgets that assume no tax increase for the coming year.
Less than half the school budget comes from city taxpayers. De La Paz’s document seeks a $10.5 million increase in the city’s share.
De La Paz presented the document to the full board just a week after discussing it in the Operations and Finance Committee. Between those meetings, he updated the request with information about Gov. Dannel Malloy’s Feb. 18 state budget — which could result in an estimated $1 million reduction in grants for New Haven.
Click here to read the preliminary budget request. The total budget request comes to $415 million, including in-kind services and benefits.
The request is “anchored” by the five core elements of New Haven School Change, De La Paz said: Student engagement, staff support, school development, community partnerships and strategic systems.
De La Paz’ memo also includes several “target” areas for investments, some of which the district aims to fulfill using outside grants, not specified in the document. The Board of Ed has made strides towards some of these targets, including expanding YouthStat, implementing “restorative” practices, redesigning Homebound and strengthening English language learning.
Gov. Malloy’s recently proposed state budget could reduce district funding by $1 million by slashing several grants that New Haven relies on, including “the Priority Schools Extended School Day Grant, the Priority Schools Summer School Accountability grant, the Healthy Foods Initiative Grant, Parent Academy, and decreases to Commissioner’s Network funding,” according to the memo.
De La Paz projected increases in salaries, contracts and services totaling $6.9 million. Costs will be reduced in central office departments, which will be expected to request little beyond normal operating funds. A decrease in fuel costs is estimated to save the district $675,000 in transportation costs — assuming students don’t require additional buses, “which is a huge assumption,” he said, when talking to the Operations and Finance Committee last week.
The last cost-cutting effort, estimated to save about $1.5 million, is to allow the “natural attrition” of specific staff members, by not rehiring people in positions deemed no longer necessary to schools.
At last week’s Operations and Finance Committee meeting, Board of Ed member Alicia Caraballo questioned whether the district should depend on staff members to retire to determine major budget cuts. Though the district offers certain administrators a monetary benefit to retire, few took advantage of the incentive at the end of 2014, she noted last week.
Will Clark, the district’s chief operating officer, said attrition could happen through means other than retirement. “Every vacancy is an opportunity,” he said at last week’s meeting.
De La Paz said Monday that the district will still consider adding necessary positions in needy schools, but will pay attention to how those additions fit within the overall budget.
Board members at the full meeting Monday asked how the budget would affect people at a school level. “At a school level, folks feel like they’re cutting back,” said board member Che Dawson.
Mayor Toni Harp asked about the results of a not-for-profit Education Resource Strategies study, which analyzed the district’s data in order to see how it could better use its resources over the next several years. She asked for a breakdown of which budget points took into account the study’s results.
“The final proposed budget will lean very heavily on that analysis,” De La Paz responded.
“Given that we paid for the report … at least we should be able to articulate what we used and what we discarded,” Harp said. She abstained from the vote to approve the budget request.