The School Budget Subcommittee met on Thursday to review what the superintendent is recommending adding back into the FY24 budget.
The Budget Subcommittee of the Greenfield School Committee met yesterday, and surprisingly, the recording was posted almost immediately:
Folks, I have sat through a lot of disheartening, soul-crushing town meetings in the last five years and while this one may not have been the worst in that regard, it ranks pretty high on my list.
The focus of the conversation was a review of what Superintendent Christine DeBarge and her administration are recommending be added back into the Greenfield Public Schools budget for fiscal year 2024 following the City Council's recent allocation of an additional $1.1 million to the schools.1
According to the superintendent, the strategy in her recommendations is to get more staff positions funded out of the local budget rather than via grants. Since grants have an expiration date, any staff positions funded by them are left in a precarious situation, thereby contributing to the much-discussed "fiscal cliff" the district will face in FY25 when all of the ESSER grants from the federal government run out.2
The first two items the superintendent is recommending be added back into the budget are a full-time ETL coordinator at the Academy Of Early Learning and a 504 coordinator. They also kept an additional first grade teacher, which they may or may not end up actually needing. There was a bit of a sidebar conversation here regarding the numbers of incoming kindergartners for the 23/24 school year, which seems to be a bit up the air at the moment. The superintendent noted that while the homeless families being relocated to emergency housing in Greenfield by the state may impact enrollment, only a few of the families so far identified have school-aged children.
Also being added back into the budget are electives and sports at Greenfield Middle School. There were no questions about or discussions of either of these items.
Next, the superintendent said that she has put the Strings For Kids program back into the budget, but stated that she did so "for the sake of conversation." She noted that the cost to the district is $26k and that there are currently 18 kids participating in it. She went on to say that her understanding coming into the district was that rationale for GPS funding SFK was to provide low-income kids with an opportunity to learn an instrument, but that based on the percentage of participants who also qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch, that is not who is using the program.
This conversation led to a bit of a deep-dive a bit later in the meeting on the music program across the district. School Committee vice-chair Kathryn Martini asked Superintendent DeBarge what it would cost to have "a basic, well-rounded music program" across all the schools. "What is our long-term vision?" The superintendent cited some of the music teaching that is already happening around the district and noted the low enrollments in electives broadly.
The conversation turned to what a music program might look like, with DeBarge at one point asking the subcommittee how they thought that would work and then essentially backing Vice Chair Martini into a corner of saying whether she would rather see Strings For Kids funded, or have fourth-grade chorus restored as an after-school offering at a single location. Martini somewhat reluctantly said that if it came down to that, she would rather see a district offering. The superintendent agreed to take a look at how that might work and come back to the committee with more info over the next few months. As for Strings For Kids, funding for that program remains up in the air and the question will go to the full School Committee at their June 14 meeting.
With staffing positions being moved out of the ESSER grant funding, the subcommittee had questions about what that grant money would be used for in FY24. According to DeBarge, that would be all of the field trip funding, Green River building maintenance, the FY24 textbook money, all of the online instructional materials, curriculum and instructional supplies, $35k of facilities repairs, and $300k of IT hardware and software. She noted that all of these would need to either be funded differently or be eliminated after FY24 when the grant money goes away.
There was a question from the subcommittee as to whether textbook purchases could be funded in FY25 and beyond out of capital requests.3 From the discussion that ensued, the general sense seems to be that there is no obvious reason they couldn't be, but no one knows for sure. There was some additional discussion here about the age of the district's textbooks and instructional materials—apparently our biology textbooks are ten years old—as well as ongoing efforts to get them updated, but no real conclusions or decisions.
The final third of the meeting was a fairly detailed review of a bunch of specific line items based on questions from Vice Chair Martini. The standouts for me here were the fact that the middle school Spanish teacher is still on the cut list and that the district has been operating with no psychologist on staff due to several retirements. Vice Chair Martini pushed the superintendent on the question of the Spanish teacher, although as it stands, the Spanish offering at GMS is only a six-week class that is part of the electives rotation.
What I found disheartening about watching this meeting is what seems to be a general myopia in the district administration. I think that everyone means well and is trying to do their best in a tough situation, and I know that Greenfield as a relatively low-income community in a rural county has a lot of challenges that cannot be solved at the local level. Nonetheless, this discussion presents a district that treats electives as an after-thought. Music and art are not considered core instruction, and the non-required electives that are offered seem to be thought of only as a means of providing teachers with prep time for math and ELA.
I am doing my best to assume good intentions and give Superintendent DeBarge and the rest of the GPS administration the benefit of the doubt here, and I am fully aware that I am an outsider looking in and that I am offering no specific policy or implementation solutions.
That said, the discussion of the district's music program at this meeting was appalling. When asked what a real music program would require and what the district's strategic plan is, DeBarge offered up a single 4th grade chorus class and then presented it a choice between either that or Strings For Kids. In the meantime, the district has spent years making cut after cut after cut to what used to be thriving music programs at the elementary and middle schools, shuffled the remaining teachers around between schools, and saddled them with additional responsibilities.
When asked about what the district does to promote non-required electives, she said that they publish a descriptor paragraph and then wait to see who signs up. Then they cut the electives teachers and attempt to staff what classes they are able to offer with a rotation of substitutes. All of this is justified by "low enrollment."
There may very well be a strategy document posted on the district website, but this approach and attitude is that of an administration that has given up on doing anything but what is required.
Alright, rant over. Sorry about that.
All of these budget updates now head to the next full School Committee meeting, which is this coming Wednesday (June 14) at 6 PM. It looks like no agenda has been posted yet.
This move by the City Council happened at their May meeting, in response to to the school funding cuts in the mayor's propose FY24 budget. More about that over here, if you're interested.
"ESSER" is the Elementary & Secondary Education Relief fund created in 2021 as part of the US government's COVID relief efforts. The funds were originally intended to assist school districts with remote education efforts, but in reality have been used by cash-strapped districts to close all sorts of funding gaps. There were several rounds of these grants ("ESSER 1," "ESSER 2", etc.), but they all expire in 2025, so anything that GPS is currently paying for out of those funds will need to either be eliminated next fiscal year, or another funding source will need to be identified.
Generally, capital expenditures are large-dollar amounts spent on durable things with a multi-year lifespan.
Taking a look at the GPS strategic plan ahead of this week’s review and vote
In yesterday’s weekly update to all the families in the district, GPS Superintendent Christine DeBarge says the following:
The Strategic Plan will be presented to the School Committee for a vote on June 14th. We are very excited to come to the final steps in creating the Strategic Plan.
Unfortunately, there was no link to the plan included in the update for families or any other members of the community to be able to see the plan ahead of the vote.
I tracked down the strategic plan that is being proposed, finding it in the meeting materials posted for the June 14 School Committee meeting.
If you (like me, I will admit) had forgotten, this plan is the output of the task force that The Management Solution (the consultancy that GPS uses for a bunch of stuff) ran for the district. This task force kicked off last fall and was composed of representatives from the GPS administration, teachers, students, families, the city government, and the City Council. They gathered a bunch of data and ran a SCOT1 analysis with these participants. Using that, they then ran the community survey and focus groups in the spring of this year.
Out of this work, the task force formulated "a streamlined mission statement" and several "strategic areas of focus." I say "several" here because while the document repeatedly references four strategic areas of focus, as far as I can tell it only ever lists three such areas.
The updated mission statement they are proposing is "The Greenfield Public School District is a place where every child is supported on their path to success."
The strategic focus areas are:
- Curriculum & Instruction
- Communications & Outreach
- Operations
Then the plan lays out an overarching goal and a set of SMART2 objectives for each of the focus areas:
- For Curriculum and Instruction, the overarching goal is "Provide Greenfield Public School students with high-quality instructional programs geared to meet the needs of all students and ensure their success."
- Communications and Outreach: "The Greenfield Public schools will build and maintain strong relationships through communication and outreach within the schools and greater community."
- Operations: "Overarching Goal: Ensure we have a welcoming environment for students to learn."
The plan sets multiple objectives for each focus area and specifies a timeframe for every objective. Each objective has a subset of actions, with owners and success criteria assigned to every action.
This plan is the sort of thing one might expect from an external consultancy—quite structured and specific. I imagine TMS has a fairly pre-baked process and structure putting something like this together; that is, after all, a big part of the reason one hires consultants.
For example, the first objective for the Curriculum & Instruction focus area is "By September 2023, create a data cycle review process to analyze student growth and achievement."
The specific actions for this objective are:
- Identify and determine data points and the review cycle.
- Review the data points and reviewcycleandtheiruse for improving instructional practices in the general education setting.
The plan assigns this action to the Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, the Superintendent, the school principals, and teachers, and then provides these benchmarks:
- By October 2023, the first round of data will be collected and reviewed at collaboration or faculty meetings.
- Data protocols will be used annually to review the data at least 3x per year (October, February, and June).
While I am not going to detail them all out here, this focus area (Curriculum & Instruction) alone has 4 objectives mapped out through 2028 and a total of 13 sub-actions under those objectives.
All three (again, what happened to number four?) strategic areas of focus follow this structure and are broken down in the same way.
This structure seems fine and is pretty clear and easy to understand. That said, I do wonder about the district's ability to attend to this plan over time at the level of detail it requires. I would be willing to bet that if we cross-referenced action items by who's responsible for them, we would see a lot of stuff piling up on the same groups of people repeatedly. I will admit, however, that I have not actually gone through and done this, so I could be wrong here.
Another analysis that I think would be worth doing is to take a close look at the "Benchmarks of Success" that the plan lays out for each objective's actions. Even a quick scan through them reveals many that are more about a specific thing being delivered rather than whether the thing delivered actually meets the need or addresses the problem. This sort of approach can easily become a checkbox exercise if the people doing it are overburdened and short on time.
I also wonder about the approach of having multiple people attached to each of these actions but not specifying who is actually on the hook for delivering it. I hope that there is a layer of detail that didn't make it into this presentation format, that somewhere there is a something like a RACI3 matrix. Otherwise, I would be concerned about the risk that everyone thinks someone else is responsible for a deliverable and no one actually delivering it.
More broadly, my big question for the School Committee and the superintendent is this: If we agree that this strategic plan is pointing us in the direction we want to go as a district, what will that actual implementation look like? What structures and supports will all the people in the "Person(s) Responsible" boxes for all of the actions have? What will the reporting cadences be? How will we know whether the actions are on track to meet the objectives, or what escalations, reprioritizations, and adjustments will need to be made if they are not?
As an apparent addendum to the strategic plan, TMS also provides a presentation of 2019, 2021, and 2022 MCAS data and analysis "for consideration." Leaving aside for now the question of the merits of the MCAS and standardized testing in general, the trend in the data presented here is pretty clear. Across the board, Greenfield's scores are getting worse, and at faster rates than those of districts across the rest of the state.
They also provide a data analysis of local MAP testing and graduation rates, the results of both of which paint a more mixed picture than the MCAS results. There is also reporting and analysis on curriculum, attendance, and disciplinary data across the GPS district. All of this data reporting and analysis runs for 37 pages; I am not going to try to dig into it any further here, but it is worth taking a look at if you have the time.
The next 16 pages of TMS's report cover the results and analysis of the focus groups that were run in the spring, as well as the district survey and and equity survey of the members of the strategic planning task force (only 11 of 26 responded to this one, apparently).
On the district survey, the top strength identified was "Food service department," with "Staff and teachers listen to questions and concerns" a close second.
The top challenges were: - Finding and retaining staff - Inadequate funding for schools - Competitive salaries
The main takeaways from this survey are that a lot of the challenges relate to funding, as well as the configuration of the schools. No big surprises there.
And here is TMS's summary:
All of the data presented in this report point to three major areas needing attention over the next 3-5 years in order to improve student outcomes: (1) attention to academics, (2) attention to other factors impacting favorable outcomes (attendance/engagement, mental health, and behavioral issues), and the (3) funding necessary to support improved outcomes.
The TMS project lead for this strategic planning process was Judith Houle. She's an SVP at TMS and served as the interim superintendent in Greenfield while the district searched for a new super following Jordana Harper's departure a few years ago.
Strengths, challenges, opportunities, threats
Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely
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Responsible, accountable, consulted, informed ↩