The massive student walkout to protest the estimated $10 million to $12 million in school budget cuts provided a powerful image of student engagement and leadership. Most of the students objected to specific cutbacks to their schools, such as losses of teaching positions — cuts driven by the slow growth of state aid, a key source of education funding in Boston. The question that the city needs to confront is why students are bearing the brunt of the system’s fiscal woes, when there is still so much inefficiency in staffing and physical maintenance that could be eliminated without harming classroom education.
One of the clearest opportunities to save money is in the BPS’s building glut. The system has a troubling number of school facilities that are being underused. According to a recent audit, the school system maintains a total of 93,000 physical seats with only 56,000 seats filled. The same audit also found other areas in which BPS could save between $10 million to $25 million in annual operating expenses, including redesigning bus routes (20 percent of routes serve only 3 percent of students, for example) and reducing spending on contracted meals.
Then there’s the BPS’s ballooning payroll. The number of students enrolled in BPS has held steady, but the department’s personnel headcount is growing fast, accounting for 78 percent of total municipal workforce growth in the last three years. The $1.027 billion BPS budget is the highest among city departments, and has gone up 25 percent over the last five years, outpacing the police and fire departments.
BPS also pays dozens of “idle’’ tenured teachers who are, essentially, excess staff. Per state law, permanent teachers who don’t get hired or assigned by the beginning of the school year are placed in a “suitable professional capacity’’ position, in which they support or co-teach with a senior teacher in a classroom as a means of professional development. But a new report by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau shows that “a disturbingly high percentage of excessed permanent teachers did not apply to any position.’’ As of last fall, 37 teachers remained in that pool for the second year in a row even though the district offered them tools to improve their teaching skills so they could have a better shot at getting hired. Significant annual savings could be realized if this pool of teachers were cut. State law should be amended so that BPS has the ability to dismiss underperforming teachers who have not been hired for two consecutive years.
The planned school budget for next year represents an increase of $13.5 millionover the current budget, or 1.3 percent. And yet, the city has to make cuts — a Spanish teacher and a librarian here, a computer science program there — to keep pace with growing expenses.
It would be great if the state chipped in more money, but changing the statewide aid formula for dividing up public education funding will be no small task. It’s tragic that students in Boston are losing educational opportunities. But BPS will get more sympathy from Beacon Hill and the public when it builds more confidence in its management practices.
