Breaking down the $1.5b BPS budget
Biggest investment area is for students with disabilities
The Boston School Committee meets Monday to discuss the $1.5 billion proposed Fiscal Year 2025 budget, which sees substantial investment from the city paired with dramatic cuts in federal aid.
Monday’s hearing will focus on the central office budget, which includes a net loss of about 210 positions and $64 million in funding. At a prior meeting, the committee discussed individual school budgets, which are declining by about 130 positions and $30 million.
But those cuts come after years of growth to the general fund budget. Let’s break it down.
The general fund budget — the part that comes from the city of Boston — would grow to more than $1.5 billion, up from $1.18 billion on the eve of the pandemic. That’s a nearly 30 percent increase.
But the last two years’ budgets included more than $500 million in funds from other sources, most notably the federal pandemic relief aid known as ESSER funds. That money expires next fall, so the district will experience almost $100 million in cuts.
The city of Boston gets most of its revenue from property taxes, which have grown thanks to the city’s growth and rising property values. The city also gets more than $200 million per year in state education aid, but most of that money goes to the city’s charter schools.
The district is proposing budget increases of $108 million across these six areas. Outside of cost increases that would require extra money just to maintain level services, the biggest area of investment is the district’s planned overhaul of how it educates students with disabilities.
Next year, the district will be rolling out inclusive education — where students with disabilities learn alongside their general education peers whenever possible — in pre-kindergar
ten, kindergarten, grade 7, and grade 9. School-level inclusion plans would be funded with an additional $20 million.
The district also plans to spend about $17 million on positions previously funded with ESSER money as well as $6 million to maintain ESSER programs like the district’s ongoing early literacy overhaul.
But they’re losing money, right? So what are they cutting?
Right. Almost $150 million in ESSER spending will disappear from the budget. Here’s what’s getting cut:
The bulk of planned ESSER spending this year was in areas like facilities maintenance, summer programming, and professional development, rather than in staff.
But there are also hundreds of positions funded by ESSER, including more than 100 each of administrators, aides, and teachers, more than 80 positions in custodial, safety, or technical roles, and nearly 90 other support positions. Nearly 200 school-level positions will be lost.
It remains unclear exactly how many layoffs those cuts will require, as the district has hundreds of unfilled positions. The cuts come after the district added hundreds of staff members while losing thousands of students in the last five years, bringing perstudent spending to the highest level of any large district in the country.
The district also plans to save $17 million through cuts to the central office budget, which would include both staffing cuts and elimination of vacant positions, and $10 million by closing classrooms at schools with falling enrollments.
A handful of schools — the Henderson K-12 Inclusion School, TechBoston Academy, Mather Elementary, and Umana Academy — are losing five or more ESSER-funded positions. But through the general fund budget, the Mather and the Umana would both gain positions.
Here are the schools that have the biggest recommended changes in staffing:
Two school budgets — UP Academy Boston and Shaw Elementary — will fall to zero, as those schools are being merged, with UP Academy Dorchester and Taylor Elementary, respectively. The Taylor would gain 34 positions, the same number being lost by the Shaw.
How were individual school budgets determined?
The district is abandoning its decade-old “weighted student funding” system, which funds schools according to enrollment, with additional money going to schools with more high-needs students.
That system had come under increasing strain as the district has padded the budgets of schools with falling enrollment beyond their per-student allocations.
Tens of millions have gone to those “soft landing” supports in recent years, a practice district leaders have long called unsustainable. The district is currently developing a new system.
This year, rather than generating budgets from scratch using the per-student formula, the district used current budgets as a baseline and adjusted them according to a small number of factors: cost savings from classroom closures, cost increases for the special education overhaul, and cost increases for rising enrollments.
What happens next?
After Monday’s meeting, the School Committee has an additional budget hearing on March 20 before a vote scheduled for March 27. The City Council will then vote on the entire city budget in June.