Ed Board Asks For That $10M After All

After weeks of deriding the idea of asking for a $10 million budget increase, the Board of Education voted to send that request to the mayor anyway, without putting a contingency plan in place for making cuts.

That about-face happened in a 4 – 1 vote Monday night at the latest Board of Ed meeting at Celentano School on Prospect Hill, after some disagreement about whether district staff had provided enough information about where all those extra dollars will go.

In total, the public school system is asking for alders to approve a $197.2 million operating fund for the upcoming fiscal year, the amount needed to continue existing services. (The money that schools get directly from the city is only about a quarter of the overall education budget.)

Darnell Goldson, the board’s president, said he will schedule hearings soon to discuss the back-up plan if — as expected — the mayor or Board of Alders doesn’t approve a $10 million budget increase.

That decision to hold off on suggesting cuts allows more time for public input, which parents and teachers had requested. But it also sets up a challenging transition for the incoming superintendent, Carol Birks, who starts her job in three weeks.

In the meantime, the board members will turn to closing a $6.9 million gap on this year’s books. They swelled that deficit on Monday night by voting to hire three temporary financial advisers, pay out a contractor beyond a grant’s allowance and promote an executive assistant for the superintendent — even as a student begged to preserve after-school programs that are already being slated to end.

Two weeks ago, Goldson had said that a budget relying on $10 million bailout from the city was ​“built on fiction.” Monday night he and other board members eventually came around to the argument that the school system can’t get what it doesn’t at least start out asking for.

“In order to continue the status quo, we need more revenue,” Will Clark, the district’s chief operating officer, argued in favor of the ask.

Ed Joyner, one of the board’s two elected members, said he didn’t have enough information to vote for an increase. He said he doesn’t know if the district is using its current funds effectively.

Goldson tried to convince him to back the budget ask by pointing out that the vote was a preliminary step. The board will still have time to ​“figure out how to make cuts” later on, based on what the alders end up appropriating, he said.

But Joyner, who came prepared with recommendations for improving the procurement process, said he couldn’t support the current system, which doles out millions in contracts without systematically asking for results.

“To not know whether we could have used money we spend on professional services contracts, which has not been evaluated and proven time-tested and true, is not very responsible. [We should] make sure that programs like Project Pride,” an outdoor experience, ​“and others don’t fall by the wayside when we’re paying people who don’t even work for us and we don’t even know if they’re effective,” Joyner said. ​“Now, I’m only one vote, but this does not feel good at all.”

Along with an abstention by Mayor Toni Harp, Joyner provided the sole dissenting vote.

Advice, In Triplicate

To ease Birks’s transition as she takes over the district’s rocky finances, Jamell Cotto, the board’s vice-president, then introduced a last-minute motion to hire three financial advisers.

Using $140,000 from Victor De La Paz’s vacancy, money that could have gone to offset the looming budget deficit, Cotto proposed hiring an auditor, a chief financial officer and a strategic planner. Hired by March 19, when Birks officially begins, the advisers would each stay on for three and a half months, according to the resolution.

Reggie Mayo, the interim superintendent, told the Independent after the meeting that the short-term hires would give Birks a chance to test-run her financial advisers.

Cotto said these positions are needed because the board hadn’t received ​“the information it had been requesting for years,” particularly monthly financial reports.

Joyner asked to amend the resolution to include more specifics. By the time the contracts run out in June, he wanted a document from each new employee: an audit from the auditor, a budget that keeps cuts away from classrooms from the chief financial officer, and a protocol for procurement from the strategic planner.

“Any fiscal person that is going into an organization for the first time wants to answer a couple of questions: How have you spent your money in the past? What is the mission of the program … and how do you propose to do that at a time of declining resources? And what policies do you currently have or propose to ensure those are done?” Joyner said. ​“It’s making sure that they provide you with a product that will let you know.”

But Cotto refused to accept the changes. ​“This ties our hands again,” he said. He wants to leave the objectives up to Birks to decide, he said after the meeting. No one else seconded Joyner’s amendment.

The three hires still passed unanimously.

“I’m going to vote for it,” Joyner explained, ​“but I’m going to worry the hell out of you about the stuff I asked for, and I will do what I have to do to get it.”

The consequences for not getting the district’s finances in order become apparent during public comment, when a student explained the way he’s already seeing the effect of the budget strain.

At Mauro-Sheridan School in Westville, a flyer went home two weeks ago informing families that all before-school and after-school programs would end in mid-April.

That includes the Shakespeare troupe that James Jeffrey, an eighth-grader, has been in for five years. Jeffrey said the theater program helped him earn a scholarship to Hopkins School next year, which he might take if he doesn’t stay at Cooperative Arts & Humanities School or Educational Center for the Arts.

“Shakespeare helped me, it’s the reason I’m able to stand up here. … It’s just something that’s so important to us. I know the money has to come from somewhere, but I just want to tell you that we don’t think it’s the right way to cut the after-school programs,” Jeffrey said. ​“Why force [a cut] that takes away what kids go to school to do?”

Goldson said there may have been a ​“miscommunication.” The board wanted to see proposed reductions, not actual cuts just yet, he said.

But as Jacob Spell, a student representative on the board, said later, even if the cuts, including school closures, haven’t been handed down yet, they’re are taking a toll on kids.

“Many students are devastated with the prospect of losing after-school activities or their entire schooling in some cases,” said Spell, a senior at Creed. ​“How would the board answer a concerned student who asks, ​‘Why is my school being closed?’ While I acknowledge that school closures are just a notion at this point, I am witnessing how such talks have been damaging to the morale of entire school communities.”