Thoughts on the FY13 MURSD Budget

Tomorrow (Monday, March 19) marks the annual Open Budget Hearing for the Mendon-Upton Regional School District Budget for the 2012-13 school year.  It is at 7:00 pm in the Nipmuc Auditorium.  If you cannot make it, it will be streamed live on the Town Hall Streams website.  On that same site you may also watch an archived video of the forum.

The Regional School Committee will be voting to certify an operational budget of $27,834,228 for fiscal year 2013.  This conservative budget represents an increase of $187,719 or 0.68% over the current year's operational budget of $27,646,509.  With this very modest increase, there will be no request for a Proposition 2 1/2 override from either community.

The creation of the FY13 budget was a collaborative process that began last August, when the Regional School Committee began meeting with the Boards of Selectmen and Finance Committees from both town. These monthly meetings, known as "Multi-Board Meetings," have been a positive development in that both school and town representatives have been engaging in regular, meaningful dialogue about each side's needs and potential revenue, for FY13 and beyond.

Our goals for the proposed FY13 MURSD Budget were the following:

1. To stabilize the district- educationally and financially- while we collaboratively build a new strategic plan to guide our programming over the next five years.
2. To create a level services budget, i.e., to keep the existing programs and staff that we have in place, ending the cycle of cuts that the district has suffered over the past four years.
3. To develop a budget that is conservative and mindful of the current revenues that are available at the state and local levels.
4. To work collaboratively with both towns in order to end the divisiveness that has existed in recent years.

I strongly believe that the proposed budget successfully meets all of these goals.

While I am very confident that we will continue to improve teaching and learning in our district, I caution that the FY13 budget is about stabilization, not growth.  I am excited to commence the strategic planning process this spring as the feedback I have received from parents and staff alike is that they want our district to be competitive and forward-thinking.  Our district must forge forward with new programs for our children, such as universal full-day kindergarten, more STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) offerings at all levels, and expanded opportunities for career exploration.  A new strategic plan will enable our district to craft a vision of how we will expand our programming, with specific goals and objectives.  These goals and objectives will guide our budgeting for FY14 and beyond.

Below is the PowerPoint presentation that I will deliver at the Open Budget Hearing.



If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section below or as always, feel free to e-mail me.

The NCLB Waiver...What Does It Mean for Us??

Last month it was announced by the US Department of Education that Massachusetts, along with nine other states, has been granted a waiver from certain provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This 2001 landmark federal law has been criticized by some for its “one size fits all” approach to school accountability. Under NCLB all public schools and districts must meet the same prescribed targets for student proficiency in annual MCAS testing in English language arts and mathematics. These targets, known as “adequate yearly progress” or AYP, have progressively become more difficult to achieve since 2002 as the goal of NCLB is 100% proficiency by all students by the year 2014.

NCLB requires schools to meet the AYP targets for not only the aggregate of the tested student population but also for each of the major subgroups, i.e., students of various racial/ethnic groups, students with disabilities, low-income students, and English language learners. The statistically significant subgroups in the MURSD are students with disabilities and low-income students. As the years have progressed, our schools have met the AYP targets for the aggregate performance; however, have fallen short on the special education subgroup recently. Keep in mind that the AYP targets are the same as the targets for each of the subgroups.

Concomitantly, the closer we have gotten to 2014, the more challenging the AYP targets have become. For example, for 2011 the state’s CPI (composite performance index) target for ELA and mathematics MCAS were 95.1 and 92.2, respectively. These figures equate to approximately 85-90% of all students and all students in each subgroup scoring proficient or better on each of the tests. This is challenging work and these targets just may be too far reaching given the amount of time since NCLB was enacted. This sentiment is verified by the fact that 82% of all schools and 91% of all districts across the Commonwealth did not meet their AYP targets in 2011. (In the MURSD, only Nipmuc achieved AYP in 2011.)

So is NCLB’s punitive system of labeling schools as “failing” based upon meeting these targets fair? Or even realistic? In my opinion, the answer is no.

Under this new waiver schools will be classified by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education individually rather than using absolute AYP targets. The classifications will look at how many students in the aggregate achieved proficiency, how many students actually improved their performance from year to year (using SGP or Student Growth Percentiles), and how much the achievement gap between the aggregate and various subgroups has been closed. The new classifications for ach school and district will be one of the following:

Level 1 On track to college and career readiness
Level 2 Not meeting gap closing goals
Level 3 Focus: Lowest performing 20% of schools (including schools with the largest gaps)
Level 4 Priority: Lowest performing schools
Level 5 Priority: Chronically underperforming schools

Over the coming months we will receive more details, as these changes will be implemented starting during the 2012-13 school year. While our goal in the MURSD will remain proficiency for ALL students, this new accountability system that judges schools based upon student growth and progress in closing gaps in performance is certainly welcome news.