As Berkshire County public schools finalize their budgets for next year, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees is explaining why some schools are struggling due to a lack of state aid. The Pittsfield School Committee is scheduled to adopt its budget tonight.
At Tuesday night’s Pittsfield City Council meeting, Tracy O’Connell Novick, from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said the city is an outlier when it comes to state funding.
She says Pittsfield has consistently made sacrifices to commit additional resources to make sure its students receive a quality education.
“So the Massachusetts Legislature created something called the Foundation Budget and it — it is a student-based formula. It’s based on the actual students you have in your school on October 1 of the previous year. And it’s a progressive funding formula. It’s progressive in two ways: first because it recognizes that greater need from students requires greater funding for those students, and also that great need in a district or in a municipality requires greater state support,” O’Connell Novick says.
The state’s Foundation Budget Review Commission works to find where and how public school districts are failing. When the initial budget review was completed in October 2015, it found an estimated cost of kindergarten through grade 12 in Massachusetts was under-calculated by at least $1 billion.
O’Connell Novick says not every district gets the same amount of funding from the state. It varies depending on the number and ability of a district’s students.
“The Foundation Formula then just becomes really a big multiplication problem: You got an actual account of students; you got it multiplied by the dollar amount that accompanies them; and you end up with a Foundation Budget,” O’Connell Novick says.
A district would receive a certain amount of money per student, and the district would be allotted a different amount for special education students and low-income students.
O’Connell Novick says the foundation budget accounts for what the state considers adequate for a district to run, but not necessarily how it should run. On average, Massachusetts public school districts spend 20 percent more than their foundation budget every year.
“And if you keep in mind that most cities are spending at foundation, that means that it’s towns across the commonwealth that in town meetings are voting themselves tax increases in order to fund schools at one-fifth above the minimum required. I think that is a pretty strong statement of where we are at,” O’Connell Novick says.
The problem is, Pittsfield can’t do that. John Krol is vice president of the city council…
“Based on state law, we are getting squeezed this year on both sides because of Proposition 2½, and since we are very close to the levy ceiling basically because of state law we are unable to get the kind of funding from the state that we need to provide for the best education but then the state is also telling us well we can’t fund it locally in order to do it because of Proposition 2½,” Krol says.
“And that is honestly why I came this evening, councilor, because I know you are facing a levy limit and Pittsfield is really an outlier in terms of where it is. Because you have intended to put so much local resources—you essentially filled the gap locally, which is something that many municipalities have not been able to do,” O’Connell Novick says.
Because of cost hikes to the city’s health insurance and the tax levy, the current $60 million Pittsfield Public School budget faces $3 million in cuts, including 74 positions. There is no override vote available to change that.
At the same time, the city needs to pay for employee pay raises, pension obligations, and a $200,000 increase for out-of-district placement for special education services.
“You have kept teachers in the classroom and that is something that a lot of municipalities have not been able to do. But you have done that because the state hasn’t been fulfilling its responsibility,” O’Connell Novick says.
So how does Pittsfield compare? City spending is about 15 percent over the state’s foundation budget.
Lee, Lenox, Mount Greylock, Berkshire Hills and Central Berkshire Schools spend more than 40 percent over their foundation budget. Lenox spends nearly 90 percent more.
Improvements are being proposed on the state level to get districts more money, including changes to health insurance policies, and how the state tallies special education, English Language Learners, and low-income students.
