Boston school spending is too opaque
Want better schools in Boston? Certainly that’s what parents, teachers, business owners dependent on a local workforce, and taxpayers looking to get their money’s worth have in mind. Well, it all starts with some admittedly boring numbers — the Boston Public Schools budget.
It falls to the appointed members of the School Committee to hold the school department accountable, by scrutinizing those numbers to make sure spending makes sense and is advancing the goals the committee has set. But a new report from the Boston Municipal Research Bureau raises questions about how rigorously the committee has been overseeing the budget. The committee shouldn’t be cowed into passing a budget until it gets real answers.
Boston is expected to spend more than $30,000 per student in the coming fiscal year. That puts it among the highest cost per capita large district systems in the nation. The cost per student has risen 46 percent over the last five years — a function in part of declining enrollments. BPS enrollment has dipped by at least 7,900 students (14 percent) over the last seven years, according to a recent report by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau.
That’s fiscally unsustainable — a fact that BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper acknowledged in a letter last month when she presented the committee with the next fiscal year budget — which totals $1.5 billion or $1.68 billion, depending on whether it’s calculated as an “all-funds” budget (the larger number) or an operating budget.
It’s the biggest single budgetary item in city spending, complicated this year by the end of some $431 million in federal money that came to BPS as COVID-era emergency relief funds.
“While our enrollment decline slowed down over the last few years,” Skipper wrote, “we must now take steps to ensure that instead of continuing to keep the lights on in empty classrooms, we instead focus our investments on the things that benefit our students most.”
That, she added, “will be different for every school. The long answer is that this is the start of a transition as we continue to work from last year.”
But the report posed a host of questions about the budget and what exactly it is buying and fairly begged the School Committee to not settle for the thin gruel offered up by BPS until it gets some substantive answers.
“We’re spending $1.6 billion of taxpayer’s money, and there’s little to nothing in the budget document about what that will mean for student achievement,” Elaine Beattie, senior strategic adviser in the Research Bureau, said in an interview.
The Bureau report maintains that while the School Committee faces a March 27 deadline to take some kind of “definitive action” on the school budget, “next week isn’t the end of the road,” Beattie said. “They have to do something, but that something isn’t to be a rubber stamp.”
The committee could, for example, reject the budget (by a simple majority vote) until they get answers to such questions as:
⏹ Spending for English language learners is going down by $12.7 million while the number of ESL students is going up. Are critical needs being met?
⏹ The transportation budget is $92.6 million, up $12 million. Whatever happened to cost reduction plans there?
In fact, the committee members did ask those questions — and actually had to put them in writing at the request of the superintendent. Wednesday night they got their answers — a week before they are expected to approve the budget.
And some of the answers were nonanswers. To School Committee member Brandon CardetHernandez’s question about ESL cuts, well, “the reality is much more complex,” came the answer from David Bloom, district interim chief financial officer. Some of it is “re-coding of positions,” “changes in the definition for [sheltered English immersion] classrooms,” and the “consolidation of some classrooms.”
As to Cardet-Hernandez’s question about transportation costs, he was told that, yes, the Inclusive Education Plan aimed at allowing more students to attend school closer to home will cut transportation costs — just not this year.
Chair Jeri Robinson asked a rather straightforward question about how many classrooms are less than 75 percent full and got this answer: “We will need a few more weeks to be able to provide an updated answer for FY25.”
Some of the questions were posed as early as Feb. 7, others on Feb. 15.
Now the answers may well be in the 68 pages of spreadsheets the committee was handed or hinted at in the slide presentations, but nowhere is there a real budget document — completed with narrative — like the city puts out for its own overall city budget.
The Boston Schoolyard News, produced by BPS parents, did its own analysis of winners and losers in the 2025 school budget — school by school — an interesting and enlightening exercise. But that’s just a piece of the BPS puzzle.
School Committee members by and large have other real jobs. This is intended as a part-time post, a civic responsibility. If the district intended to keep committee members guessing about the critical issues BPS faces and how the budget will impact them, they’re doing a good job of it.
The real question is how long School Committee members — and the parents and students they are supposed to represent — will put up with that kind of treatment.