The Rochester City School District community is in turmoil over the district’s budget proposal. Conflict with the teachers union over the contract (and most everything else) adds fuel to the fire, and contributes to longstanding community distrust of the district and its numbers, fed by years of threatened and largely abandoned budget cuts.
Controversy is inevitable when significant spending cuts are involved. The anger and misunderstanding is deepened by leadership’s decision to fix longstanding budget inequities at the same time. The proposed shift to roughly equalize per-student funding across the district’s 60-some schools was poorly timed and badly explained to the public. The district put out apples-to-oranges comparisons that confounded the two issues of overall funding cuts and the new school funding model, leaving itself vulnerable to even more criticism than perhaps was warranted.
With all schools experiencing cuts, parents are in an uproar and no school felt enough like a winner to agitate for the plan. Using Facebook, blogs and other online tools for connecting, community opposition to the district’s proposal is perhaps better organized and more vociferous than it has ever been.
The troubled relations between district and union leadership have intensified the rhetoric and left the community experiencing a lot more heat than light. While Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard and Rochester Teachers Association President Adam Urbanski parse line items, the big picture and important facts are obscured, including an accurate understanding of how we got here. Some key points:
l State aid cuts are not responsible. State aid was cut by about $500,000 in a budget of more than $677 million.
l We dug a much larger portion of this hole last year by spending $24 million in reserve funds to avoid –apparently only defer—painful cuts. That’s why “one-shot” budget solutions are a bad idea: the hole they temporarily fill only opens again the following year.
l The most significant contribution is rising costs, $51 million of the projected $80 million gap, according to district figures. That includes about $26 million for increases in employee benefits, $11 million for salary increases, $9 million for higher transportation costs and $2 million for increases in facility expense.
The increasingly personal public debate has consumed attention that should be going to examining different ideas for closing the budget gap. At the state level, lawmakers adopted a budget on time partly because they accepted Governor Cuomo’s proposition that there simply wasn’t more money to spend.
Eventually, the Rochester school community must come to a similar conclusion: There is a gap to close, and there are a limited number of ways to do so, not all of which are being discussed. In upcoming days, we will discuss some of them on this page.
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Kirstin Pryor is a proud parent of Maya (8) and Mason (4) at Franklin Montessori, where she serves on School-Based Planning Team. Before returning to Rochester three years ago, she spent 9 years as a middle school teacher, union member and literacy coach in Baltimore City Public Schools. She and her husband are both graduates of Wilson Magnet.
Kent Gardner is an economist. Two children having left the nest (after graduating from Irondequoit High School), he & wife Jill have only the puppy, Reilly, to raise.
Erika Rosenberg expects to send new daughter Nina and her big brother Nate to East Irondequoit schools. A reporter before joining CGR, Erika walked the D&C’s education beat for 5 years.