Afton Partners

As perplexing as this spring has been, the next school year could be the toughest ever. It looks complicated and challenging. Here’s the problem: costs will be higher and revenues will be lower. What makes this the perfect storm is that it happened suddenly and dramatically increased the level of challenge and cost for school districts. There are at least six reasons school will cost more next year including addressing remediation needs, addressing trauma, taking preventative measures, dual programming, additional hygiene, and new expectations. Dr. Marguerite Roza, who for 18 months has been warning districts to get ready for a downtown, anticipates “anywhere between 5-20% impacts on state budgets which could bring 1- 8% impacts on districts.” She adds, “The financial implications depend on how long states constrain their economies and whether/how much stimulus states will get.”

Together with a task force of accomplished educational leaders—including former state chiefs, superintendents, federal education officials, and charter school network leaders—this report sketches a framework that can help state policymakers, education and community leaders, and federal officials plan appropriately for reopening. As communities and public officials start to think about the problems ahead, states, districts, and schools should consider at least six different buckets of work: school operations, whole child supports, school personnel, academics, distance learning, and general considerations. Because of the unique challenges of this moment, it is imperative that planning start now.

I worry that districts are losing precious time by not taking steps now to mitigate the cost side of the equation. Every day the can gets kicked down the road makes it harder to square budgets next year — and more likely that students will pay the price. Careful cuts now can help cushion both teachers and students from more disruptive and deeper panic-induced cuts later. while leaders of large districts point to looming disaster, most haven’t announced any near-term reductions in salaries or furloughs of hourly workers, even where it would mean minimal or no impact on students. Some staff aren’t working full time right now (think crossing guards, bus drivers, custodians, etc.) and could be eligible for federal assistance and/or unemployment if furloughed.

Amid the economic warning signs there’s the recognition that a recession, in addition to shrinking K-12 budgets and spending, could upend policies that have developed over the past decade that have prioritized equitable funding and other resources. Jess Gartner, the CEO and founder of Allovue, an education management firm that helps districts create and plan budgets, acknowledged that conversations about consolidating or closing schools that are significantly below their enrollment capacity are often difficult. But it’s better to consider the possibility and do other budget diagnostics in relatively calm circumstances than “trying to do that in the height of a crisis.” “It may well be a matter of survival for the district” she said. She said it’s also important for districts to scrutinize contracts and other expenses every year, instead of letting bureaucratic inertia take over, and to be careful not to use one-time grant or other funding for teacher positions that can’t be sustained when circumstances crunch operating budgets.

A team from MIT’s Operations Research Center, created an algorithm that saved Boston schools $5 million and 1 million miles driven in its first year. One of the most expensive school transportation departments in the country was able to reduce its fleet by 8 percent, the largest single year-over-year drop in district history. “They were the clear winner,” says Will Eger, Boston Public Schools’ strategic projects manager — and that winning solution, which did in just 30 minutes what used to take a team of 10 staffers 3,000 hours to accomplish, can help districts all across the nation. The best solution turned out to be not the one with the fewest buses per each school, but one that reuses buses from school to school. The ongoing work the team is doing with Boston has led…an MIT professor, to launch Dynamic Ideas, a company marketing the product to other school districts, now in the early stages of adoption.

West Virginia’s public school system, because of a series of technical, logistical, and political hurdles, is one of the last major government bodies in the state to detail for its citizens exactly how it spends its money. That’s inflamed mistrust between taxpayers and public school officials and left a $2 billion blank space (more than half the state’s budget) in the auditor’s popular and award-winning “WVCheckbook” website, where taxpayers can search through thousands of government transactions and salaries. “We need to make sure all the data that we maintain regarding student achievement and spending is available to the public in a way that they can understand,” State Auditor John “JB” McCuskey said. “This is the public’s data.”

The state education department told the Education Institute of Hawaii that it didn’t have the technological tools to give a line-by-line accounting for much of the $2 billion in K-12 spending, including teachers’ and administrators’ salaries. State departments of education across the country this year have been under intense pressure to open their fiscal books to the public, a technologically and politically complicated feat. Hawaii also is among several states with antiquated data systems that can’t track the thousands of transactions school districts make throughout the school year. Department officials are blaming those data systems for high-profile glitches that have occurred this year as state legislatures seek to boost teacher pay and states look to comply with a new federal requirement to break out school spending amounts. “To have any sense of empowerment, you have to have an idea of the fiscal health of the department,” said former state assistant superintendent and 2018 gubernatorial candidate Ray L’Heureux.

A common myth is that principals are like CEOs of their schools, with authority to make key decisions and strategically deploy resources. The reality, though, is quite different. Principals typically are treated like middle managers, with little control over the $694 billion in annual U.S. public education spending. At the state level, school finance formulas determine how dollars are allocated to districts, virtually all of which contain allotments that are restricted for specific purposes. But perhaps the biggest impediment to giving school principals more autonomy are school districts, where most spending decisions are made by central offices. Instead of giving principals actual dollars to spend, most districts allocate staffing positions and other resources based on one-size-fits-all models. For example, a district might dole out one teacher for every 25 students, an assistant principal for every 250 students, and a social worker for every 500 students.

Where, exactly, do those billions of dollars taxpayers annually spend for schools go? In most states, policymakers really don’t know. That’s because state education departments don’t have the technology to track the tens of thousands of transactions that district officials, using a combination of federal, state, and local dollars, make throughout the school year. So instead, the departments give lawmakers a receipt that includes a summation of broad spending categories, a breakout of average salaries, and maybe a mention of whether spending is up or down. But overhauling education departments’ data-collecting tools…can cost millions of dollars and fan flare-ups between policymakers over student privacy and local control. It’s a price tag and an ideology battle few policymakers want to take on.