Budget cutting without rancor: one district's rational process for protecting spending that's close to students

School Administrator, August, 2003 by Carmen Mariano

How should you reduce your school department's budget by $8 million? First, pray you don't have to. If that doesn't work, do what Quincy did.

The Quincy, Mass., Public Schools serve a blue-collar city of 90,000, located 12 miles south of Boston. The district includes 18 schools that house 9,000 students and 1,200 staff. In FY '02, the school district budget was just under $63 million.

In March 2002, Quincy's superintendent and school committee requested $67 million for the following year. Such an increase was steep, but could be supported. All 16 of the district's collective bargaining agreements were expiring. The projected cost of successor agreements was more than $2 million.

The cost of special education was on the rise as well. In FY '02, Quincy overspent its special education budget by $2 million. Those lines were expected to go higher in FY '03.

As the request went forward, however, some dark financial clouds developed. The Massachusetts economy faltered and state aid was sharply reduced. City tax revenues decreased. Goodbye $67 million budget. Hello $59 million budget. Instead of a $4 million increase, the school committee and superintendent faced a $4 million budget reduction effective July 1, 2003. Thus began their search for $8 million.

Where they found those reductions is less notable than how they found them. Quincy's superintendent, Rick DeCristofaro, had a plan.

Organizing Figures

Step No. l of that plan: Identify the deficit for FY '03. This step was necessary because there was quite a difference between the reduction in budgeted dollars and the reduction in budgeted services from one fiscal year to the next. As has been noted, the district's FY '02 budget was $63 million, The '03 budget would be $59 million. That represents $4 mil[ion less. Yet, the FY '03 budget would have to "find" $2 million in special education funding that was spent but not budgeted in FY '02 and $2 million to fund negotiated raises that were not part of the FY '02 budget. Thus in order to balance the FY '03 budget, $8 million in current services would have to be reduced.

Once people understood the dramatic size of the deficit, the superintendent moved to Step No, 2: Organize the budget into possible areas of reduction. We did so as follows:

* Expenses: Non-academic (including utilities, custodial supplies, capital outlay) and Academic (including supplies, learning materials, instructional equipment, computer hardware and software)

* Subsidized Services (including any current salary or expense that was or could be subsidized by a user fee, such as transportation, athletics, extracurricular activities, building rentals)

* Support Services: Non-academic (including salaries of custodians, maintenance personnel, security guards, clerks) and Academic (including salaries of guidance counselors, psychologists, principals, paraprofessionals and system-level administrators).

* Academic Programs (including salaries relating to specialized academic services for students, such as elementary art, music and physical education, English as a second language, balanced literacy, drama, middle and high school health, Air Force Junior ROTC and special education.)

* Classroom Teachers (salaries paid to instructional personnel whose reduction would increase the overall size of regular education classes in a grade, academic department or school).

Setting Priorities

After organizing the budget, the superintendent moved to Step No. 3: Prioritize possible areas of reduction. Rather than list his priorities, DeCristofaro drew a diagram (see page 14).

Each ring of the target represents an area of possible reduction described in Step 2. The closeness of each ring to the target's center symbolized how directly each area of possible reduction affected Quincy's students.

Through that picture, the Quincy School Committee and the superintendent declared what mattered most to them. They planted their financial flag in the classroom. That picture, and the priorities it stood for, created a focus for the three months of meetings, hearings and deliberations that ensued.

Class size was their prize. And they kept their eyes on that prize.

If cuts had to be made in services to Quincy students, those cuts would have an impact on every other ring of the target and every aspect of service before those cuts would affect class size and classroom teachers.

It has been said that "if you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything." The superintendent and school committee stood for low class size. Then they climbed to Step No. 4: Identify projected savings per budget area. This meant putting dollar amounts against every expense, salary, program and service that had been organized in Step 2 and prioritized in Step 3. The superintendent did that with the help of his system-level administrators.

Raising Fees

It was then time for Step No. 5: Present budget options to the school committee. In this step, DeCristofaro presented almost $7 million in service reductions. His presentation began with non-academic expenses and touched every ring of his target on his reluctant path to the academic classroom teacher and class size. He and the school committee approved reductions in expenses of 31 percent, support salaries of 23 percent and academic programs of 5 percent.