2009-2010 School Budget Review

(Released to the web March 14, 2009)

How is the 2009-2010 Readington school district budget shaping up so far?  As is typical, the answer is complicated.

In many respects it is an exercise in futility to attempt to qualify school spending based on budget reports.  Yes, all the dollars are quantified in such reports, but the state-defined account codes and often baffling or misleading descriptions do not lend themselves to detailed analysis.  For example, our current budget has account code 11-000-230-530-000-100 labeled as "Gen Admin-Comm/telephone."  Yet, the dollars associated for that account are entirely for postage!  Similarly, other account code descriptions make sense either to someone at the state level or to administrators in our district while providing little guidance to a citizen trying to figure out how much is being spent on a certain program.  What is more, spending on one area or class of item is frequently spread across multiple account codes, either by necessity for budgeting purposes or sometimes by design to more easily justify spending.

In Readington, as in other school districts, individual budget managers propose annual spending for their domain.  Principals budget for their school, the technology, facilities and transportation managers budget for their areas, etc.  Then, the individual budgets are combined into one for review by the administration and school board.  Our budgetary software vendor provides a budget justification report which allows for descriptions to be broken out under each account code.  This report is used during the budget preparation process and it is the best available handle we have to get a grasp on proposed spending.  Even so, any analysis depending solely on this report would be deeply flawed.  There is no single human being in the district who can tick off the background and rational for all of the line items in this report, and even individual budget managers will sometimes struggle to explain off the top of their head the line items in their own domain on this report.  Sloppiness is not unknown.  This year during the budget committee process it was discovered by a member of the public that the budget for diesel and gasoline fuel was skewed high when compared to the number of gallons actually sold by the township to the school district in the previous year.  After correcting those figures and using a more realistic figure for cost per gallon, the "savings" was $53K.

In general, budget managers work up a new budget based on previous spending.  Review from the top of the food chain tends to be high-level and focuses more on comparisons between budget years and comparisons between schools than it does on the value of specific items.  School budgets are built on percentages, not on the defense of each dollar.  During the course of a year budget dollars are moved between account codes and repurposed for different needs, to the extent that the law allows.  Budget managers routinely pad their budget with "contingency" money for this reason, giving them an opportunity to rob Peter to pay Paul if need be.

At the end of the fiscal year our district typically spends the money which exceeds the state-mandated cap, or else socks it away in capital reserve accounts.  Otherwise, it would be returned to taxpayers.  In May 2008 it was determined that there would be about $1.1 million in budget surplus, and by June 2008 it was decided to put about $900K of that into capital reserve, with the rest going to "pre-purchases" of various things. As of February 2009, it was projected that in the 08-09 budget year there would be $569K surplus remaining over the allowed 2% cap, which would otherwise go back to the taxpayers if it was not spent with "pre-purchases" before the end of the budget year.  Already, though, there is about $94K planned for technology pre-purchases, including tablet PCs for teachers and administrators. Pre-purchases of chimes (tubular bells, actually) and a xylophone were also mentioned.  Due to the amorphous nature of budget dollars, truly the only accurate way to analyze a new budget is to wait for the money to be spent over the course of the next year and then go back to trace which vendors received the money! 

The 2009-2010 budget strains under these familiar structural issues, and it also carries the baggage of recent events.  Before we get to a review of the current budget justification report, consider some of this budget baggage.  The school board and superintendent are touting their heroic "savings" of $600K in employee health benefit costs.  Yet, this bragging ignores the painful mistakes made by the school board in 2007 and 2008 in choosing an ill-considered short-term health benefits plan despite advice by the public to the contrary.  It ignores the invaluable and voluntary contributions made by the teacher's union, which agreed to renegotiate their existing contract with the school board in order to help them fix a mess the RTEA did not help create.  At the time, the union was assured that their contribution would be remembered, but that memory now may be obscured by talk of further health care benefits contributions by teachers.

In a similar vein, the district is touting savings of $57K by "choosing" not to purchase a new IP based phone system.  That assertion ignores the fact that it was a small group of private citizens, fighting tooth and nail against the idea of a new phone system for months and months, who finally embarrassed the district into backing off the idea of a new system in favor of seeking a support and maintenance contract on the perfectly functional existing phone system.

The approaching sewer tie-in for the district, while unquestionably a positive move, does not save as much money as the district sometimes implies in public presentations.   For instance, we will no longer need to spend $7000 for septic testing each year, but we will still need to add in $10,000 in sewer line monitoring and management costs.

It is mentioned in public presentations that an enrollment of 70 fewer students this coming school year will lead to a savings of $315K in teacher salaries and benefits.  The implication seems to be that a "right-sizing" of staff typifies the tough decisions the administration and school board are making, which would result in the loss of teaching positions in the middle school, in one elementary school, and of various instructional aides.  Yet, this tough decision-making did not seem to apply when the school board acted against the wishes of a virtually united public to prematurely extended our superintendent's contract and offer him guaranteed annual raises.  Interestingly enough, in the 05-06 school year Readington had 2269 students and for the 09-10 school year total enrollment is projected at 2085.  During that same period in which we lost enrollment of 184 students we also added a full-time assistant superintendent position and administrative positions for humanities and math/technology.  Apparently "right-sizing" takes on different meaning depending on the context.  What happened to class sizes during this period is well known, especially when compared to neighboring districts.

The latest public budget justification report as of this writing is dated February 18, 2009.  If we tease out some of the more notable items from that report, we come up with the following (in no particular order):

~ The school board has extended the superintendent's contract and spelled out his annual raises, but the superintendent has agreed to forgo his raise in the next budget year.  However, the school board has not yet instructed the business administrator to reduce the $203,618 amount budgeted under "Gen Admin-Salaries" for the superintendent in order to align with the current reality.  The new contract allows for a maximum of $3500 in spending to support "professional growth" of the superintendent, but the budget appears to allocate $3800 for that category.  The superintendent's contract also allows for payment of membership fees in various professional organizations "subject to the maximum set forth in the budget."  Well, that amount appears to be another $3740.

~ Professional memberships for the assistant superintendent and for other administrators totals another $5400. Meanwhile, the Leadership Links three year initiative to help school principals improve their managerial skills consumes $14K of this budget.   

~ The board of education has it's own memberships totaling $23K. The Business Education Alliance membership comprised $4K of that amount.  We're told that this fee brings the district alerts for cast-off business furniture and that last year we picked up some used filing cabinets as a result.  Hopefully those are some very nice used filing cabinets.  The budget has $8.5K allocated for board members to participate in the annual NJ School Boards convention in Atlantic City and NJSBA workshops.  Could fewer members attend?  Could it be skipped altogether for one year?  There is even $1K allocated for board and committee meeting refreshments.  Couldn't we brown-bag it for a year?

~ Technology and technology support purchases, as usual, figure prominently in the budget.  Support for the the SIRS student record keeping software has budgeted about $12K, and the SMARTS central office software another $11.5K.  Yet, the actual SMARTS support fees will be less than $10.5K.   What that extra thousand dollars is for isn't explained, nor is the $5K budgeted for additional training on these software programs.  Both SIRS and SMARTS are mature products with a long history in the district; staff are already thoroughly familiar with the products.

Meanwhile, there is more than $20K for new domain servers and another $5K for consultants to help the district implement the latest and greatest operating system on those servers.  A Macintosh server is another $5K, and a there is $15K put aside for an in-house Moodle implementation.  Could we make-do with our existing domain servers?  Could we go with a much less expensive hosted Moodle implementation or just skip that initiative this year and concentrate instead on integrating what we've already purchased?  Many of the district's servers and computers are leased, a purchasing method which arguably is imposing too high a cost on the district and masking the true cost of this equipment by spreading it over multiple budget years.  A single lease of some laptops, in year two of four, consumes $33K in this budget.  A five year lease on SMART boards begs the question: will these gadgets even last that long?

While we're on the subject, there is $120,900 budgeted for tablet PCs for teachers, not including spare parts or implementation.  In spite of the annual outcry by the public about technology spending, we continue to make new purchases before we've even digested previous purchases.  The contrast with the corporate world during these brutal economic times could not be greater.

~ As noted above, the district has finally contracted with a vendor to provide maintenance and support on the existing phone system.  Though that agreement does not cover phone sets themselves, one wonders if the $8K budgeted for phone repairs is excessive.  Refurbished phone sets are widely available in the $75 to $150 range, which would purchase between 50 and 100 complete phone sets for the year.  Do we really go through that many?

~ In spite of public and private discussions among district educators about putting together a less expensive and more tailored set of K-5 social studies materials developed in-house, this budget has between $164K and $186K (depending on what is counted) budgeted for a K-5 social studies textbook program.  By contrast, developing materials in-house and supplementing with some books and materials purchases would likely be in the $40-50K range.  The reason for the sudden bias toward an expensive and ill-fitting textbook program could be a mistrust by administrators of the idea that teachers are capable of handling the project on their own or coordinating materials among each other.

~ New grade 6-8 math textbooks are budgeted for $99K.  However, the administration has previously been warned privately by readingtonparents.org that the NJ state math standards are changing and could render a new purchase of textbooks a big mistake.  Sure enough, the New Jersey department of education has now sent a memo to chief school administrators urging them not to purchase textbooks based on the existing 2004 standards, since the 2009 standards are expected to be ready by this summer.  Could this $99K possibly be spent prudently when the new math standards aren't even due until weeks before the opening of school?  Would a new purchase of math textbooks be better put off until next year?

~ The cost of technology-based assessments and test-prep programs is difficult to pin down, even when not counting the time put in by staff to implement these programs and even when not counting the cost of hardware and networking to support the software.  Licensing for the NWEA testing program is more than $30K.  Turn-key training, in which teachers offer mini-courses to colleagues, comprises $75K of the budget.  A big chunk of that turn-key training is related to training for NWEA testing.  The Criterion web-based writing program, which is dumbing-down student writing to prepare students for the moronic NJASK writing prompts and snuffing out the remaining joy of students who were born to be writers, consumes $12K of the budget.  Thousands more is budgeted on test-prep programs like Study Island and Brain Pop.  An undetermined amount would be spent for after-school test prep programs where teachers meet with targeted students in an attempt to raise scores for the district.  Despite all of this ongoing test-oriented spending, our scores are lackluster at best.

~  The district newsletter, a pure propaganda piece which in the past has helpfully served up dated news and self-congratulatory fluff, is in the budget for nearly $10K in printing and postage.  One wonders how important this is anymore, given the existence of the district website and the LISTSERV email service.

~ On the same subject of printing and paper, in the budget there is at least $44K in copy paper and $115K in copier leases.  Maintenance and copier supplies are more yet.  Interestingly, there is $3.5K for 62 new licenses of Adobe Acrobat, a software program designed to help reduce the use of paper.  Yet, there does not appear to be any systemic district effort to analyze or reduce copy-printing.  Even a tactic so simple as reducing font size and copying double-sided on paper destined for student backpacks would substantially reduce paper use.  In the corporate world, the use of inexpensive ($2K) workgroup copiers capable of monthly duty cycles in the 200K page range have supplanted the use of giant production copiers.  These workgroup copiers can be used for a few years and then thrown away.  Would our district be better off replacing a few of our expensive leased production copiers using this strategy?

~ While it is least desirable to question expenditures directly related to students and classroom instruction, there are some items which do stick out--especially during an historic economic downturn.  There is the band trip to Dorny Park for a total of $4K.  There is the $10K allocated for the 8th grade promotion.  Could parents pay for cap and gowns, or are they even necessary?   There is $10K associated with running Red Ribbon Week, Violence Prevention Week, etc.  Could that be accomplished another way? 

~  Somewhere along the way each school year it is questioned how much is spent for legal fees by the district.  Attorney Fogarty and Hara are down for $75K in this budget.

There are plenty of other items which might attract attention in this budget: the amount of training for technology staff, or the amount spent on musical equipment and supplies.   There is the $8K budgeted for roof repairs in spite of all the recent spending on new roofs,  or even the $1K amount spent on "video tapes" which we are told are actually DVDs.  There are also budget items for which there is little immediate control--salaries and benefits are already negotiated, special education costs are determined in IEP meetings or by student or family circumstances.

There are notable things missing from this budget.  For example, our bus fleet is maintained essentially by one mechanic, whereas neighboring Branchburg has two full time mechanics and a part-timer.  School bus inspection reports available on the web from the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission have shown that our bus inspections tend to turn up items like loose seat mounts, exhaust leaks, faulty lights, and uncharged fire extinguishers.  Is our mechanic too overwhelmed to find the time for these sorts of simple repairs?  Would the district have safer buses if it budgeted for a part-time mechanic or a rotation of Vo-Tech students?  For another example, our teachers are allowed only $250 in discretionary spending for their classroom each year.  That typically works out to around $10 or $11 per student.  Ten years ago, even when a dollar had more purchasing power, the teacher allowance was $500.  No wonder parents today are inundated for requests for classroom supplies and teachers are spending more of their own, personal money to stock their classrooms. 

While this budget may not be as poorly prepared and overly padded as in some other years in recent memory, it certainly doesn't scream frugality either.  There is "contingency" padding in the numbers.  Given the consistent surpluses in recent years, which were ultimately spent by the district as "pre-purchases," one would not be out of line to ask some hard questions.  Is this the tightest budget we can create?  Given the current state of the economy is it too much to ask that some programs and initiatives be pared back or eliminated?

Last budget year, the district used students as pawns to drag their parents to the polls, resulting in the first passed budget in many years.  Tellingly, the "kids vote" was not repeated in the presidential election.  Whether this cynical ploy is used again this year remains to be seen, as does the possibility that anger at the school board for prematurely extending the superintendent's contract will spill over to the budget vote.  Whatever the case, there does seem to be some room for improvement in this budget when the rest of the world is hanging on by a thin economic thread.