New School-Funding Fix Debated

The district’s chief financial officer is proposing a new way to fund schools more equitably that already has some principals, parents and teachers calling for him to hold off until next year.

CFO Victor De La Paz and school community members debated the plan at a recent meetings of a new ​“school funding committee,” which is working to create a more equitable way to allocate funds to schools.

Because of the disagreement, the committee will likely submit recommendations to improve next year’s budget process to Superintendent Garth Harries in mid-December, not November as planned.

De La Paz created a new hybrid model to standardize the ways in which each school is allocated money from the district. Ultimately, he said, he wants to ensure each has at least the minimum level of resources needed to teach students in the next fiscal year.

Some committee members said he is changing the funding system too drastically and too soon.

Engineering & Science University Magnet School parent Jill Kelly argued De La Paz’s model would cut a large number of staff from many schools.

Metro Principal Judy Puglisi asked De La Paz to slow down the process of adopting a new model, to allow time for a thorough survey of principals, to see which resources they have and which they are missing in their schools. She said she does not want the committee to make any large decisions based on statistics and numbers alone.

Puglisi said she would prefer to implement any districtwide changes in the 2017 – 18 fiscal year than rush into a new system for 2016 – 17.

De La Paz said he agrees his plan needs more thought but argued the inequity among schools is too large to wait another year. He said committee members are focusing on the ​“losers” instead of thinking holistically about how to improve the funding system.

How It Works Now

Schools are funded inequitably and for no discernible reason, according to a controversial study New Haven commissioned last year from the not-for-profit Education Resource Strategies (ERS).

At the most recent school funding committee meeting, De La Paz illustrated this inequity using a chart of each school’s budget from the general fund, per pupil allocation, and percentages of students with need. Click here to see the full chart.

Mauro-Sheridan and L.W. Beecher, both interdistrict magnet schools, receive significantly different amounts of money from the district’s general fund — though they have similar enrollment numbers and students with similar levels of need.

Mauro-Sheridan receives $4,756 for each New Haven resident student compared to Beecher’s $2,324, which has 329 local students.

Mauro-Sheridan has 6.5 percent ELL [English Language Learning, or English as a second language] students, 11.2 percent in special education and 57.8 percent who scored low on the standardized Smarter Balanced exam last spring. Beecher is 3 percent ELL, 9.9 percent special education and 73.2 percent low-scoring on the SBAC.

The ERS report said that school-by-school differences did not explain this kind of funding variation in the district.

“Next year, I want there to be a correlation,” De La Paz said. ​“Unless we put that in place, it doesn’t happen.”

Needs Assessment

Puglisi, Kelly and Davis School Principal Sequella Coleman sent out a short ​“needs assessment” to principals, a list of three questions to help the committee see what they need in their schools. The assessment asked principals what essential resources they need, what essential resources they are missing, and whether they have adequate resources to meed their needs.

“A principal can say, ​‘I have no need now, but when that grant money is gone, I might,’” Puglisi said, explaining the framing of the questions.

She said her group needs a month to collect all responses from principals and another month to analyze that information. ​“It’s important work that should span a year, so we can do it very well informed and with great integrity.” She said any new funding model should be applied in two fiscal years, to allow the committee more time to develop it.

“This year, if there are gross inequities, work on a case-by-case basis,” Puglisi suggested.

Lola Garcia-Blocker, the district’s chief of staff, agreed with De La Paz that a year is too long to wait.

“Honestly I didn’t even need these numbers to know who the haves or have-nots are,” Garcia-Blocker said.

“Do you find that the disparities in the numbers reflect experiences in the buildings? Are schools you consistently see as cheated in experiences in the building also the ones that are not thriving? Are they the ones that show up as low dollar values?” Kelly asked.

“That I don’t know,” Garcia-Blocker said.

“That’s what the heart of my concern is,” Kelly said.

Hybrid Model 1.0

In October through early November, the committee considered a few models: a staffing model that would set a 25:1 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 a hybrid model merging the first two.

Members felt most comfortable with the hybrid model to set aside money for a standard student-teacher ratio and use remaining available general funds for weighted student allocations at a school level.

Click here to read more about that.

This version of the hybrid model would set an average student-teacher ratio of 25:1 for each school — costing the district about $109 million of its total $227 million in operating funds.

Then the district would have about $9.4 million to use for students at all 47 schools, after transportation, facilities and maintenance, central office staff, adult education, magnet operation and special education tuition costs were subtracted from the operating funds.

A formula would weight student need, including English language learners, special education and state exam scores, to determine how to allocate that $9.4 million among the schools.

But this model is too rigid to actually even out funding disparities between the schools, De La Paz concluded.

“There’s a case to be made,” he said, that a lower-performing school needs more staff than a high-performing school.

Hybrid Model 2.0

So he came up with a second version of that model, the one now on the table. It would allocate about $93 million in per-pupil money to schools first based on their student need and then have schools pay for needed staff with the remaining money.

“That way, if [Lincoln-]Bassett has a higher number of kids who are low-performing, they can get the funds they feel are necessary to address the needs of those kids,” De La Paz said. But schools are not being guaranteed a minimum staffing level, like in the first version.

Kelly tracked the change in the number of full-time employees each school would be able to afford under the model.

Some schools lose full-time staff members and others gain them — part of the process of increasing equity among them. But Kelly argued the model does not lead to an ​“intelligent decision” based on which schools are already over- or understaffed. ​“They just let it all fall out in the numbers,” she said.

“We need equity of experience, equity of education,” she said. ​“That’s not always the same as dollars per student equity.”

Some schools stand to lose or gain hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff. According to Kelly’s calculations, Mauro-Sheridan would lose about $500,000 and the ability to hire at least 9 staff members. Beecher would gain about $80,000 more and not need to cut staff.

In total, schools would not be able to rehire about 170 teachers, she calculated.

De La Paz said that calculation is not correct, since schools allocated more resources would ​“buy back” teachers lost from other schools. ​“We’re going to be looking at impacts of 10 to 50 people and then it’s a conversation of, ​‘Let’s talk to the city about more money,’” he said.

Kelly argued this model is equivalent to a weighted-student model, which she rejected because it would be closest to a privatized ​“market-based model.” If parents decide in large numbers to pull their students from a certain school, that school would lose most of its funding.

Principal Puglisi said this version of the model would end up increasing class sizes, since schools would lose teachers.

Committee members said they do not want to take large amounts of money from schools to fund others next year, especially if they do not believe in the new model.

“Celentano currently has about 61 teachers,” said Metro teacher Nataliya Braginsky. If they lose 10 or more teachers, ​“think about what impact that would have on the school. That’s grave.”

“I would disagree that that’s new inequity,” De La Paz. ​“I would say it’s equity, and it hurts. The fact is that Mauro-Sheridan is going to lose some staff and a school like Lincoln-Bassett would gain it. That’s where we’re going to be in either 6 months of 16 months or 26 months, if we agree that students with higher needs deserve more than schools without high needs.”

Alternatives

The committee presented a snapshot of the current inequity among the schools to a group of principals, teachers and district officials at a subsequent meeting. De La Paz said he learned from that meeting that the committee does need a ​“school-by-school understanding” of how much schools’ individual programs — such as STEM or arts — factor into their needed resources.

And he learned that the inequity is not going to be solved in just a year. ​“Whatever we propose for next year’s budget has to be step one for a multiyear process,” he said.

But De La Paz said he cannot delay the process as Puglisi requested — since he wants to be able to tell schools how much money they are allocated next fiscal year by mid-January 2016. Instead, he said, the committee will have to figure out a ​“parallel process” so that the needs assessment can ​“inform final budget decisions but not necessarily allocations to schools.”

De La Paz said he is also drawing up models to factor student poverty level into the funding system.

“What we’re saying is that in a world where next year’s budget is very likely to be identical to this year’s budget, some schools need more than they have this year. It absolutely means that these funds have to come from somewhere. Either it has to come from other schools or it can come from efficiencies in the central office,” De La Paz said.

He said though some teachers and administrators believe central office is too big, the ERS report said it was ​“lean. People didn’t like the report because of that. I don’t have the conviction to say that central office should be reduced.”

At the beginning of the school year, De La Paz took $630,000 from some schools and allocated it to 14 on the lower end of the ERS graph, in part by using carryover state Alliance District grant money and by reducing budgets of some interdistrict magnet schools.

The 14 schools received between $25,000 and $60,000 each — not nearly enough to make a large difference, De La Paz said. To make a real difference, he would have to move closer to $10 million total into schools with few resources, he said.

“I fully intend to do that again next year,” he said. ​“I’m really contemplating — can we make that much bigger next year? Can we scale up?”

The next meeting of the school funding committee will be in early December.