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After decades of sameness, the School Department has tweaked its budget timeline and while it has been a blessing to them, not everyone is on board.
“I do think there’s merit to the sequence of the process,” said Town Meeting member Carol Savage, who spoke during the public comment portion of the School Committee meeting last Thursday night.
Savage said she’s heard the committee modified its budget timeline this year, but believes it’s important to hold fairly steady to the typical timeline that includes the committee submitting a budget to the town manager in January, the town manager compiling it and sending it to the Finance Committee.
The change
The School Committee still voted a budget in January and sent it to the town manager, as is required by the timeline laid out in the town charter.
But this year, said Superintendent Dr. Frank Hackett, the committee was very clear about the fact that it was a starting point for the budget. In between the preliminary vote and the bottom line recommended budget that was voted March 20, Hackett and the School Committee budget subcommittee continued to meet, met with the Finance Committee, and surveyed educators and families.
And when the School Committee took up the budget for a vote on March 20, Hackett had two more sets of recommendations for the committee to consider, which in the end did in fact change the bottom line by a little over 7%.
Savage said during public comment that she understood there might be additional requests related to literacy and she could get behind that. In fact, she felt there was broad support for additional literacy funding, but “whether or not the other recommended requests that are coming are as urgent or could have been anticipated early in the process, I think is a question that will need to be decided upon. But I think the process matters and the sequence of the process matters.”
She did suggest there’s a worthy conversation to be had about whether or not the district has enough time on the front end of budget discussions or whether the January deadline could be pushed out.
How’d it work out?
“I just want to reiterate what I’ve said publicly in other places that the ability to have time with this budget has been incredibly helpful, and I think it’s not just helpful for us administratively,” Hackett said.
He added it was also helpful for the School committee and more importantly, it was helpful for the district to be able to get what he called “really true and high quality” data and feedback from students, staff, and the school community “around what they value, what they believe this school system should represent, what they believe the school system should include in programs and how we should support our students and our teachers.”
Much of that feedback came through ThoughtExchange, a massive survey tool the district used for the first time in developing its budget.
The district conducted three surveys of staff and school families. Hackett said 293 educators participated in the staff survey alone, “which I can tell you, I think is pretty impressive.” And the community provided over 30,000 ratings on the 681 thoughts presented, he added.
“That’s a tremendous amount of feedback,” he said.
Hackett said it was their first run through using the survey and a big change in their budget process and they plan to refine it and continue to use it going forward.
Why time is important
Without time, the School Committee wouldn’t have been able to get the level of engagement they did, Hackett said. Plus, he added there isn’t a whole lot their department can do with the budget before January, which is when they’re expected to vote on the budget.
“November and December are busy for a lot of reasons and there’s a lot of business the School Committee conducts outside of just the budget,” Hackett said. “So it’s been challenging.”
Hackett said it also seems to him that the School Committee actually has less time with its budget than other committees, largely because of the process.
And it’s not the first time the committee has re-voted its January budget later in the spring. In fact, Hackett said for the last two years in a row, the committee changed up the budget’s bottom line, one year as late as April.
“It just makes sense to make sure that you’re coming to the Town Meeting floor with a budget that accurately reflects all the information,” Hackett said.
And the best information often comes post January, he added. And while he acknowledged there could still be exceptions in that, there is always the chance for change.
“This additional time allowed us to refine a budget to the point where we have a high level of confidence in where we are,” he said. “We’ve got a good handle on our projected expenditures.”
For more information, details and slide decks on the School Committee’s proposed budget and process go to Finance & Operations — Winchester Public Schools.
