ITEM FILE PHOTO
Marshall Middle School.
For Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy, formulating next year’s public school budget is a tightrope act as she juggles and concentrates on avoiding a fall into fiscal abyss.
Pegged at $138.5 million, the budget is $800,000 more than the spending plan funding schools and nearly $20 million more than the budget adopted four years ago. The school committee began poring through the budget last week, but it is Kennedy, as mayor and committee chairman, who crafts city spending plans and is ultimately responsible for their success or failure.
In formulating the school budget, the mayor has to pinpoint ways to pay for an increasingly multi-faceted public school system. Like it or not, the days of classrooms and libraries have given way to specialized public schools.
Special needs services, a once non-existent school expense, will cost schools more than $15 million next year. Fine arts, once the domain of after-school piano teachers or summer classes, is a $2.4 million school expense. School security was an unimaginable need two generations ago but it is a $1 million line item in next year’s school budget. Even outreach to parents — once encompassed in fall and spring “parent nights” — costs $73,000.
Schools like Lynn’s face challenges not known to schools in wealthier and smaller communities. Lynn’s public school population includes students who frequently move with children landing in one school system only to find themselves uprooted and flung into another.
The range of foreign languages spoken in local schools encircles the globe. For immigrants, schools are a destination for the children of families seeking a new life and new opportunities far away from their homelands.
Lynn educators and their counterparts across the state are required to look beyond their own needs to build school budgets. They must build state spending thresholds into local spending calculations. Foundation budgets and so-called net school spending are baselines that do not reflect local school spending priorities so much as state expectations for local education.
Kennedy has argued bitterly against these state mandates and the roadblocks they represent in budget planning but next year’s school budget will include $2.2 million to meet net school spending.
On the flip side, significant state tax dollars are included in revenue calculations for the school budget with complicated formulas determining how much Lynn and other communities receive. Part of the formula focuses on defining economically disadvantaged children and not everyone in local schools and serving on the school committee is convinced the current definition best suits the needs of Lynn schools.
If state educators want to boost local efforts to craft a school budget that helps kids, they should develop a formula for reducing net spending obligations by giving the city points toward new school construction.
The new Marshall Middle School opened in the spring and planning is underway for most likely two new middle schools. Modern schools help students succeed and boost teacher morale, and those benefits should be rewarded by reducing spending obligations set by the state.
Critics of this idea will point out the state’s prominent role in paying for school buildings. But that observation fails to take into account the long-term benefit of building new schools and reversing the academic declines that have sent some school systems into receivership.