Woonsocket school board proposes $80M budget
But spending plan contingent on outcome of contract talks
WOONSOCKET — The School Committee has provisionally approved an $80.8 million budget for FY 2019, acknowledging that the spending plan will have to be revisited to account for presently unknown personnel costs resulting from the renegotiation of collective bargaining agreements with the Woonsocket Teachers Guild and two other workers groups – all of which expire at the end of June.
Woonsocket Education Department (WED) Finance Director Brad Peryea parsed the details Monday in a joint meeting with members of the City Council, some of whom are bit peeved over the looming question-mark of those new personnel costs.
While he praised Peryea’s thoroughness and candor, Councilman James Cournoyer said, “We have a contract that expires just two months from now and we have yet to have any substantive collective bargaining talks to this point.
“It’s ludicrous that we’re getting started with so little time before the existing contract expires,” he said. “For me, the point here is that this is proposed as a balanced budget, but there’s a gaping hole in it – a huge unknown with respect to the teachers’ contract.”
Another issue that drew concern from members of the council is the purported drain on the WED’s finances caused by RISE Prep Mayoral Academy, which is poised to grows a new third grade in September en route to its grade-per-year evolution into a K-8 charter school.
Council President Dan Gendron said the effective cost to the WED is $2.2 million, a figure that represents $457,000 in tuitions combined with a loss in state aid resulting from RISE’s siphoning away 160 resident pupils from the traditional arm of the public school system.
When RISE Prep was first proposed the school was billed as a “net-zero” proposition by advocates, according to Gendron. In theory, he said, the cost of the funneling students into an alternative setting was supposed to be offset by savings in the public schools, but it hasn’t panned out.
“School officials confirmed we have not seen any of the savings we were promised with the implementation of RISE Mayoral Academy,” Gendron said. “We need to at
least identify the fact that this RISE Mayoral Academy is hurting our traditional public school system.”
A member of the negotiating committee, Peryea said the combined salary costs of all workers in the school system – teachers, secretaries, custodians, paraprofessionals and others – is currently budgeted at $41.8 million. Health care and other benefits for those workers are inked-in at another $18.7 million. Both represent costs that do not take into account collective bargaining with the Local 951 of the Woonsocket Teachers Guild and two other worker groups.
The collective bargaining team is also renegotiating two other contracts set to expire on June 30, including that of Local 1137 of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, of AFSCME, which represents secretaries, custodians and other office workers.
Paraprofessionals, including teachers’ aides and other non-certified classroom help, represent the third group of workers in line for a new contract. The WTG negotiates on
their behalf, according to Peryea.
In a recent series of interviews, Teachers Guild President Jeff Partington has made it plain that the union will be pushing for a significant salary increase during the ensuing round of talks. The union’s position is that the time has come to bring salaries into line with those of counterparts in other districts after the reign of the austerity-minded Budget Commission. The panel was brought in by the state in 2012 to avert municipal bankruptcy and was dissolved after 33 months, leaving the city with a fiscal overseer in charge of enforcing a five-year plan for righting the city’s budget ship.
The WED has come a long way since the days of the commission, Peryea noted.
“It’s great,” he said. “We’ve posted surpluses during the last three years. We’ve climbed out of a hole. We’re fiscally stable and we want to continue to be so going forward.”
Even a nudge of a few percent would add millions to personnel costs, but Peryea said the WED is committed to keeping the budget balanced. When the new personnel costs are known, he said, the administration would present the School Committee with a menu of possible cuts and let the officials decide where spending should be trimmed to hold the line.
“Our biggest concern right now is getting through the negotiations and figuring out how to make it work,” he said. “We’re going to make it work by adjusting our expenditures, not from seeking additional revenues.”
At $80.8 million, the proposed budget represents an increase of about $2.5 million over the previous year, or about 3 percent. But Peryea said the hike is all but covered by an increase in state aid. Peryea said the WED thought it had reached the end of the multi-million infusions in state aid under a new funding formula last year, but an unexpectedly robust increase in student enrollments resulted in another boost.
About 105 new students entered public schools this year, an increase of about 2 percent, lifting the size of the student body to 5,921, according to Peryea.
Traditionally, the WED accounts for about 60 percent of the overall city budget, but only a comparatively small portion of the revenues used to pay for education are levied through local taxes on real estate, motor vehicles and business equipment – a figure that’s hovered around $16 million for the last several years.
That calculus is on track to remain fairly stable in the WED’s 2019 spending plan, according to Peryea. State revenues account for about 77 percent of the spending plan. Local taxpayers will kick in about 21 percent in all, including $16.1 million from taxes.
Roughly $500,000 more is derived from local revenues other than taxes, including $275,000 in tuitions from outof-city students who attend the Woonsocket Area Career and Technical Center. The budget also counts on taking in roughly $150,000 in rental fees from athletic facilities, according to Peryea.