BOE Asks For $199M Budget

After a two-hour debate about what a ​“realistic” budget looks like — and when would be the right time to adjust it — the Board of Education voted to request an extra $10.8 million in education spending from Mayor Justin Elicker’s first citywide budget.

The school board’s ask reflects a flat-lined budget, with just the amount of money needed to pay for all the ever-increasing costs of employee salaries, business contracts and bulk supplies, without any new hires.

The Board of Education finally arrived at asking for $199 million from the city — a 5.74 percent increase over last year’s budget, without the current deficit — in a unanimous vote, at the end of a marathon, 215-minute meeting at King-Robinson School, after elected board member Darnell Goldson introduced a spate of amendments that mostly lost in deadlocked ties.

(The board’s total budget, including restricted grant funds, is around $270 million.)

The votes came after a larger debate about which education budget is more ​“realistic”: The one that shows the true cost of teaching 20,675 kids, most of whom are growing up in poverty? Or the one that readies for another year of flat-funding from state and city governments, which are struggling to balance their own budgets?

The Board of Education ultimately decided to ask for it all — almost. The request doesn’t include any increased spending that some board members had wanted to add. Nor does it include any decreased spending that some administrators had proposed cutting.

“We know what our responsibility is, statutorily, and that is to provide the best quality education to our students,” said Goldson, who’s been making the case for more school funding, with district administrators, on a tour of community-management team meetings. ​“If we got lucky enough to get the $196 million and we end up $3 million short, we’re to blame, because we didn’t ask for what we needed.”

“We as board members have a responsibility to ask for what the district needs, then let the chips fall where they may,” he added.

Ed Joyner, another elected board member, called it ​“an ​‘if-then’ strategy.” He argued the school board members should ask for the full amount, before identifying a back-up plan, based on what the state and city can pull from their coffers.

The board did leave out $688,000 in proposed increases to keep up school buildings, update heating and cooling systems, repaint the Field House track, consolidate its data platforms and pay its part-time assistant teachers a few dollars above minimum wage.

But it also wouldn’t commit to an estimated $3.5 million in proposed decreases to find new grants, ask for furlough days, lengthen bus routes, bring in fewer substitutes, and hire a smaller, less experienced teaching force.

Matt Wilcox, the appointed board member who proposed voting for a budget that didn’t include any cuts, said that the school system couldn’t guarantee its mitigation strategies would actually work.

“None of those mitigations are without a lot of issues, without problems and without a fair amount of success attached to them,” Wilcox said. ​“I guess my root question is: How firm are you thinking you can find $3.5 million?”

Phillip Penn, the district’s chief financial officer, said that he could.

“Well, yes, that’s our recommendation, as an administrative team,” he said.

But Penn added that a final budget figure was ultimately up to the board.

“It’s the board prerogative to go with whatever number is most appropriate,” he said. ​“The question is: Whatever we find out the real budget is that we’re awarded, how do we then pull back from whatever that number from what’s proposed?”

After Penn presented the budget, with roughly half the cuts that administrators had asked board members to lock in last week, Goldson proposed four riders to the budget.

Only one of them would have changed a budget line item, appropriating an extra $190,000 to raise part-time assistant teachers’ wages by $2, usually to around $14 an hour.

The other three amendments asked Interim Superintendent Iline Tracey to turn over more information to the public, usually in biweekly disclosures, about how much the district is spending on its staffing.

Reflecting a recent split in loyalties since Elicker took office, the board’s new leadership — Yesenia Rivera, the president; Wilcox, the vice-president; and Joyner, the secretary — voted two of Goldson’s amendments down in a split 3 – 3 vote and led Goldson to withdraw another one.

(Goldson, the board’s former president, along with Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, the board’s former secretary, and Larry Conaway, voted in favor of the amendments.)

Specifically, Goldson asked to know, by May 2020, how New Haven’s educator salaries compare to other districts, especially at the extremes for top-dollar administrators and bottom-rung paraprofessionals. That was the only budget rider that passed with a 4 – 2 vote, with Rivera and Joyner in opposition.

Goldson also asked what will happen to course offerings and class sizes when the district chooses not to fill a position and how much more the district is paying in salaries each time it replaces an outgoing employee. Both those proposed budget riders that were rejected in a tie.

Elicker, who could’ve cast the deciding vote either way, left the meeting early to attend a vigil for Dashown Myers, 18-year-old Wilbur Cross High School football player who was fatally shot on Sunday afternoon, in the city’s first homicide this year.

Elicker explained that he would’ve recused himself from the budget votes anyway, since he’ll ultimately decide the dollar amount to propose to the Board of Alders.

After the meeting, Tracey declined to comment, when asked if the board’s refusal to commit to the proposed budget-mitigation strategies now would make it harder to identify those cuts later on, as Penn had suggested at recent meetings.