Both Sides of Override Question 1

A Better Override will enable the schools to “catch up” with past enrollment growth, to provide new technology, and to provide everything as to which they’ve demonstrated a need and effectiveness with facts and back-up information. That is the standard we should use. The Better Override would result in the School Department budget still increasing by 19% to 20% over the next three years, far exceeding the projected enrollment growth of 7.6% over that period.

The Selectmen can put a Better Override on the ballot before the end of June – they should commit to doing so rather than playing into fear-mongering and bullying the Town by saying that the only options are the inflated override in Question 1 or no override at all.

But even with no override at all, the School Department budget next year would grow by $3.9 million, or 4.5%, which is double the projected enrollment growth. Beyond millions in existing reserve, contingency and revolving funds, the Selectmen have identified $2.3 million in potential efficiencies and non-tax revenue sources.  And the Board of Assessors has just declared a $1.1 million surplus in its overlay account, which can be called on at any time and would actually cover all of the reductions identified by the Schools for next year.

What would $2 million buy? It would be only slightly more than 1% of the spending on the schools, but could fund half of the debt service on a new $60 million school, or could fund the debt service on $30 million of open space acquisition. We need to think long-term.

We need to take this override seriously. It involves the decision of whether sound financial practices will apply to the Schools and the Town, or whether increased expenditures and taxes will be approved without a demonstration of what the dollars will accomplish and without promised savings being accounted for. The Override Study Committee looked for answers to those questions, and didn’t get them. The answers to those questions will affect not just this override but also future overrides.

The “yes” campaign has highlighted “incremental” tax increases in single years. Again, we need to think long term. Those increases will be cumulative. They will not just happen in one year, as some seem to think, but will continue permanently, year after year. In addition, the operating override increases will become part of the tax levy and will compound each year under Proposition 2 ½, and become part of the Schools’ base staffing for future enrollment growth.

Just the proposed May overrides with Proposition 2 ½ compounding will result in tax increases of about 20% in 4 years and 27% in 6 years.

With the planned expansion and renovation of the High School ($100 to $200 million), a major elementary school project, including a possible new ninth K-8 school ($50 million to $70 million), and staffing that would run $10 million to $15 million per year, there are looming tax increases of about 40% in 6 years.”

I served as an honorary member of the Override Study Sub-Committee on Demographics. Various members of School Committee would attend demographics sub-committee meetings but they didn’t share a great deal of information or take a very active role in discussions. Proponents like to imply that a great deal of dialogue and cooperative problem solving happened in the process of all of the override meetings. This was not the case. When asked questions, they usually didn’t have the information requested at hand and instead sent us to places to get the answers. New Growth Money, which is the result of added property valuation from renovations and new development gets added to the total tax revenue above the 2.5% tax, used to split 50/50 between the Town and the Schools, however, for FY 2016 an additional $4 million for the schools so, adding the proposed $8 million override to this would result in an almost $12 million budget increase for the schools. This is a bigger override than people think. Of the new growth tax revenue in FY 2016, the schools will get an increase of 4.5%, while Town Departments will see a 1% increase. This pattern of altering the 50/50 split to give the schools additional funding to address enrollment growth needs has been happening for many years, perhaps for the last decade.

The Board of Selectmen seem to only be concerned with what the schools say they want and writing them a blank check, without assessing whether or not all of the funding requests were necessary. They way the pro-override folks frame the argument, if you don’t vote Yes it means you don’t care about the kids, which isn’t true. There does not seem to be an acknowledgment on the part of the schools that other aspects of Town life are also critical to children’s well being, such as parks and recreation or public health. The Schools have not made the proper effort to explain why they need the money.

The way School Superintendent Bill Lupini presents the school budget, it’s impossible to understand because it’s completely non-analytic—no understandable charts and graphs, columns and rows are not totaled up and there are no comparisons to past years’ funding for each line item.  Schools have already made faulty recommendations like putting a school at Amory Park and wanting to hire a PR person when they should be hiring a data analytics person. If we over-tax the middle class, we won’t have the diversity we keep telling people we value. Bringing kids in from the city just gives us the fake impression we have diversity when we’re pricing people out of our own community.

It’s disingenuous to say we’re making an issue over a little bit of money. The difference between the Question 1 amount and a better override is substantial. It would fund the borrowing costs for at least half of an additional elementary school and by starting out as a higher amount, it will continue to compound yearly, growing by 2.5%- 3.5% a year, yielding a much higher amount in the future. It’s in the schools best interest to save some tax capacity for the overrides down the road.

When the override hearings started, I thought it was going to be a conversation between the town and the schools about what was really needed, what our mutual priorities should be and how we can balance those needs, but it never was. I guess I was naive for thinking it would be.

I’m one of those fixed income people who could be priced out of this Town I love and I know many other individuals in my situation. There are a great many divorced and single women who choose to live in Brookline and the economics of that is extremely challenging. Also, my research for the second Understanding Brookline report on Poverty documented the almost one-third of our population who are living with income levels indicating they may be economically insecure and just getting by.”

The Brookline Public Schools made a major shift toward accountability and rigorous data collection in the last decade, focusing on long and short-term goals. The Strategic Plan of the Public Schools of Brookline was introduced in 2009, implementation of which occurred between 2009 and 2014.

A team that included Superintendent of Schools Bill Lupini, key school administrators, members of the school committee, and BPS teachers wrote the Strategic Plan. The mission was to ensure all Brookline students develop skills and knowledge to lead a productive, successful and fulfilling life.

The Plan was divided into 4 main categories.

1. Academic Excellence through Content, Pedagogy and Relationships
2. Educational Equity
3. Thriving in a Complex Society
4. Continuous Improvement Using Data

BPS realized reporting on and using detailed metrics would improve equity and ensure educational accountability. “With the strategic plan, we began holding ourselves accountable to articulated goals in all four key areas,” Stone said.

There are over 7200 students in the BPS and approximately 1,000 employees, serving eight K-8 elementary schools, a comprehensive high school, a pre-K program for 300 students (BEEP), and myriad satellite programs.

The Override Study Committee and its many sub-committees engaged in 200 meetings, many of those attended by Superintendent Lupini and other members of the Schools administration. There are over a thousand pages of documents and reports provided to the OSC. The BPS was extraordinarily cooperative and did their best to supply the OSC with everything they requested within reason.

The OSC report was unanimous in calling the Town and Schools well managed and in confirming what the 2008 OSC had also found: there is no identifiable fat or waste in the BPS budget.

Two misleading statements from the “no” campaign are:

1) “School enrollment has increased by 25%.”

The bigger enrollments have not yet reached the high school. The elementary school enrollment has increased by more than 38% since 2006. There is no grade K-8 below 500 anymore, and three grades are just below or just above 700 students.

2) “BPS’s budget has grown 44% since 2006.”

This includes the growth attributed to the 2008 override, when we added 100 minutes a week to the student day and added elementary world language in grades K-6. The OSC confirmed that spending per pupil now when adjusted for real dollars is actually lower than 2006, and much lower than 2008.

“While schools are holding the line on costs while increasing enrollment, we’ve only been able to do that by starving some of the student support systems as enrollments increased.”

Brookline does not go to the override option casually or often. This is just the 3^rd operating override since Prop. 2 ½ passed in 1980, and we have never defeated an operating override. In 2008, there were two questions – one for a $5.4 million override that fixed structural deficits in the Town and Schools, and added the time to the school day; the second for an additional $8 million to finance a new K-6 world language curriculum.

The largest part of the override passed by more than 60% approval. The extra funds for elementary world language passed by just under 54%.

Some of the cuts that the No campaign suggests could be made to have a lower override are cuts to the very supports we have in place for our most socioeconomically vulnerable students. If that’s what they call “wants” not “needs,” we disagree strongly.”

“With the respect to the Town under projecting tax revenues, the Town actually spends the excess from conservative projections wisely when they exist: paying into post employment benefit funds for which the town is liable, building renovations like the Police Station, 1/3 of the main library renovation, Runkle, Heath, and a new Town Hall are examples. This conservative approach also allows the Town to deal with situations like spending $4 million instead of the $380K projected for snow removal without diverting from other programs. It also is a key factor in our AAA bond rating, which keeps borrowing costs down.

Brookline’s well-established fiscal policies have resulted in maintaining an AAA Bond Rating, which helps us borrow at very low rates.

We can’t fund stuff too thinly. The MBTA is an example of funding an agency too thinly.

A smaller override will result in budget cuts, lost teachers and it would cost the Town an estimated $90K to fund another election. The proposed lesser override saves condo owners only 13 cents a day.

I also maintain that a new election could not be held in time to stop the implementation of the no override budget being proposed by the Superintendent and Town Administrator (which is, of course, subject to the Town Meeting and School Committee process.) This seems to be a central tenet of the No campaign. The notion that within a week the Selectmen can come up with a new number without public process or vetting is completely unreasonable, perhaps even irresponsible, and is not the way budgeting is done in a AAA rated community such as Brookline. I also note that there will two new Board members after the election (and a new chair who won’t be elected until the 5/12 meeting.)”