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Superintendent Carol Birks: Three ways this budget deficit could play out.
A school building will be vacated. Bus stops will be moved farther apart. Maintenance contracts and special-education tuition will both be renegotiated down. Seventy-six certified educators and dozens more staff will all see their jobs eliminated.
That’s the best-case scenario, Superintendent Carol Birks said, as New Haven’s school system stares down a $30.7 million budget shortfall next year.
If Gov. Ned Lamont’s first state budget doesn’t come through with a $10 million increase in the city’s share of education money, more than 170 teachers could see their positions cut next school year, she added.
Birks warned about that possibility during a two-hour Finance & Operations Committee meeting on Tuesday evening. Held just at the start of the weeklong February recess, only about a dozen people showed up at the Meadow Street headquarters to hear about the school system’s bleak financial outlook.
As administrators scramble to make up the difference, Birks presented three outcomes that could happen next year.
They went from bad to worse.
The worst-case scenario: Eliminate 172 teaching positions.
In the best-case scenario, Birks explained, the district will take five big cost-cutting measures that will collectively save $20.4 million. That includes:
- Cutting staff by eliminating two unfilled Central Office positions (for a chief of staff and assistant superintendent for curriculum) and one principal, reassigning 56 teachers and 19 aides (out of nearly 2,000 certified and 650 non-certified employees total), and slimming full-time staff outside the classroom;
- Emptying out buildings by ending a lease and consolidating programs;
- Maximizing revenue by replacing programs with grant-funded alternatives and negotiating better rates for out-of-district special education tuition
- Lowering transportation costs by reviewing bus routes; and
- Analyzing contracts to end unnecessary services, renegotiate flat-funded renewals and combine services with city government.
The rest of the shortfall, Birks said she hopes, will be made up by a $10.3 million increase in state funds for New Haven’s schools.
Birks added that she hopes most of the staffing cuts could be done by reassigning staff to fill vacancies, rather than laying them off. That’s what the district did last year when it eliminated 130 positions with only 24 layoffs, including several who were eventually called back to work.
Three schools below 80 percent capacity: Strong, West Rock and Brennan-Rogers.
If the state comes up with only $5 million extra, that leads to the second scenario. In that case, Birks said the district will need to close a school, remove its principal, eliminate 52 teaching positions (for a total reduction of 108 jobs) and dismiss part-timers, on top of all the other budget mitigations above.
Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans said only three elementary schools are currently below 80 percent capacity: Strong 21st Century Communications Magnet, West Rock STREAM Academy Inter-district Magnet and Brennan-Rogers Communication & Media Magnet.
All of the high schools are above 90 percent capacity, Redd-Hannans added.
In the worst-case scenario, if the state offers no increase at all, Birks said the district will need to eliminate 116 teaching positions (for a total reduction of 172 jobs) and dismiss even more part-timers, on top of closing a school and all the other budget mitigations from the first two scenarios.
Joe Rodriguez: Prepare for doomsday.
Joseph Rodriguez, the newly appointed vice-chair of the finance committee, pointed out that there could even be a fourth possibility, a “doomsday scenario,” if the estimates that Birks used for her mitigations don’t add up.
“I don’t think that this financial mess is any one person’s doing. You’ve only been here a year, and some board members are new as well,” Rodriguez told the superintendent at the end of the meeting. “This is not a mess that began in the last year or two or even three years. This is a deep issue that we are now confronted with — the boiling point that we find ourselves in — and we have to address it. I think the previous administrations were fortunate enough to get by, but we don’t have that luxury.”
Rodriguez added that he’ll be asking everyone to lobby state legislators for additional education funding. That effort starts this Friday, when a group of parents from Edgewood School are organizing a trip to Hartford to testify at the Education Committee’s public hearing.
On the campaign trail last fall, during a stop in front of East Rock Magnet School, Lamont said he wouldn’t cut education funding during his first year in office. But the candidate added that he believed schools “can do things more efficiently.”
Most of the school district’s money comes from the state’s Education Cost Sharing formula, which attempts to equalize per pupil funding by how much municipalities can raise through property taxes, giving more to poor cities and less to wealthy suburbs.
This year, out of New Haven’s $187 million school budget, the state put up $148 million in aid.
That means the state paid 79.2 cents on every dollar that went directly to education. Or, once $50 million in employee benefits is factored in, the state paid 62.5 cents on every dollar.
Conversely, that also means only about 6.8 cents on every dollar paid in property taxes went directly to education. Or once employee benefits are factored in, 16.6 cents.
City officials argue that the Education Cost Sharing formula should be paying out more. State legislators have short-changed the formula for years, holding back more than $400 million last year out of the $2.4 billion that was promised to school districts.
For eight years straight, state aid to New Haven’s school system has appeared as a flat-funded amount on budget documents.
But that’s because of the way that the city budgets. In fact, the state has increased the Education Cost Sharing formula payouts for Alliance Districts, the state’s 33 lowest-performing districts, but it came with more strings attached.
Through an add-on to the formula, New Haven’s share of funds has increased by roughly $12 million over those eight years. But the increase doesn’t show up on budget documents, because the Alliance money is supposed to fund new programs, not cover existing ones.
Critics say those spending restrictions do nothing to help with the basic problem of raising enough local tax dollars in poor areas to fund a school system, sometimes even adding on new programs while classroom instruction is cut.
Birks faces precisely that quandary now.
In the single biggest mitigation effort to close next year’s $30 million budget shortfall, she proposes using $7 million in grants to fund programs that will tackle the same problems that employees on the payroll are currently working on now.
But Birks said that she’s hoping city residents can persuade the state to kick in unrestricted funds that will prevent layoffs, either through changes to the Education Cost Sharing formula or a boost to Inter-District Magnet funds.
What’s her pitch? “It’s about our kids. They need these resources to be successful,” Birks said. “The district has been flat-funded for eight years. With restricted funds, we cannot pay for a principal.”