Testimony of Suzanne Wells

President, Ward 6 Public Schools Parent Organization

            Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

            The Ward 6 Public Schools Parent Organization (W6PSPO) met on March 21, 2023, to discuss the school budgets for FY24.  Out of 13 schools, five received increases to their budgets averaging $335K with a median gain of $252K.  Eight schools received cuts to their budgets averaging $167K with a median loss of $142K.

            Seven of the eight schools that lost funding had to cut positions such as classroom teachers, social workers and specials teachers like PE and music. We all know uncertainty over funding from year to year contributes to teacher turnover, and a lack of stability at schools.

            The city’s budget for next year is bleaker than it has been in many years.  The combination of the end of the covid relief funding along with the declining tax revenues means the city has difficult choices to make in terms of funding for many important programs.  We realize it becomes increasingly hard to make schools whole when there are so many other programs to fund. Yet, the sense of our group was that many schools still are not getting the funding they need to fully staff their schools, and cover inflation and teacher salary increases. 

            In a difficult budget situation, it means every dollar has to be wisely used.  For DC, we must focus holistically on the DCPS budget and the charter sector budgets.  Today our education dollars are spread very thinly across 249 schools (135 are public charter schools), and we pay for the management of 69 separate school systems (DCPS is just one of the 69 school systems).  We have 37 high schools in the city today many with small enrollments, and competing for a limited number of students. This is a very expensive way to run a school system, and it is hurting all children and in particular those most at-risk, because we are not able to fully fund our existing schools.

As incredible as this sounds, for close to thirty years, there has been no planning between DCPS and the PCSB on the opening of new schools.  Both DCPS and the PCSB are continuing to open new schools or expanding capacity at existing schools.  This lack of planning has resulted in over 30,000 empty seats across both sectors.  Empty seats are most often found at the schools with the most at-risk students and they are the ones hurt the most when the city spreads its education dollars thinly across too many schools.

            The Council has an important role to play in oversight of both DCPS and the charter sector.  We can’t continue to address the budget problems facing schools by throwing more dollars at the problem.  As difficult as it is going to be, we must find a way to better align our schools with the number of students the city has.  We must find a way to better support our by-right public school system.  And, we must stop opening new schools across both sectors without careful analysis of enrollment trends and needs.

Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Betsy Wolf, and I will have 3 kids at Amidon-Bowen next year. I wasn’t the only Amidon-Bowen parent signed up to testify today, but I’m the only one who can make it given work commitments. I want to start by noting that holding the hearings during the work day is difficult for most parents to attend, and only parents with the most flexible work schedules can be here.

In the FY24 DCPS budget, Amidon-Bowen saw a slight increase, and after facing staffing cuts for many consecutive years, we are grateful and relieved. But we also recognize that the allocated resources are not enough.

First, DCPS adds a new program each year that requires our staff to do more. Last year, it was a new CES (autism) program when we did not have a single staff member trained in that area. This year, it is the construction of a new daycare center at the school which was not done in collaboration with the community. This new center requires more work and oversight for school administration, as well as more work for unpaid parent volunteers who are now tasked with locking and unlocking the playground on the weekends and trying to hold DCPS accountable. We need to move away from the model of DCPS and the city doing things TO school communities and towards a model where the city works WITH the school community to make things better.  

Second, many of our students are still dealing with trauma in the aftermath of covid-19. The school is doing the best they can with what they have, but there is still a need that is not being met, which has real and multi-year consequences for the school.

Third, there is continued and critical need to focus on the whole child, instead of just focusing on programs that improve test scores. Amidon-Bowen is a wonderful place for this, with a robust sports and music program led by veteran teachers, and the opportunity to participate in FRESHFARM FoodPrints. Years ago, parents at Amidon-Bowen wanted their children to be able to participate in FoodPrints, but we couldn’t afford it because the PTA could not cover the cost. We ask that the city continue to provide funding for FoodPrints to allow equitable access to the program. My eldest child has been nagging me to make one of the FoodPrints recipes, and my second child smuggles fresh vegetables home in her bookbag. I take these signs to mean that the program is working.

In summary, it’s great that we didn’t have our FY24 budget slashed. Yet we’re still got a long way to go. Last spring, about one in five of our 3^rd-5^th grade students scored proficient on the PARCC in English language arts, and only one in ten in math. This doesn’t mean the school is failing or underperforming – on the contrary, the school works hard to improve student learning and enhance student well-being. But there are so many inequities baked into the system that affect student achievement. We need to recognize that, and allocate resources accordingly.

Hello, my name is Elizabeth Corinth. I am a ward 6 resident and the parent of three DCPS students at School-Within-School @ Goding, where I currently serve as the LSAT chair. As we prepare the DCPS budget allocations for FY24, we urgently need to address the insufficiency of the baseline budgets that schools receive. 

I challenge you to find a DCPS school that feels that its baseline budget allocation is truly sufficient for its baseline operations. I challenge you to find a DCPS school that didn’t find itself using one-time stabilization or recovery funds for expenses that are ongoing and part of its baseline operations in FY23. I challenge you to find a DCPS school that felt it had enough left over to adequately address the true specific and extraordinary recovery needs brought about by the pandemic. And I challenge you to find a DCPS school that is not deeply worried about what it will do next year when some of these one-time funds are no longer available. 

Most concerningly, I challenge you to find a DCPS school that did not use some amount of its targeted funds, intended to serve at-risk, special needs, and other underserved populations, towards expenses which are in fact part of the school’s general operations. When this is the state of affairs, we are failing those students with the greatest need by claiming to provide them with additional support but placing it on a crumbling foundation.

Also concerningly, I challenge you to find a DCPS school that doesn’t feel the need to tap into family donations and contributions, to whatever extent its community can provide them, in order to cover programs and services that they consider to be the bare minimum they should be providing to their students. Some schools are able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to supplement their programming, while other schools raise little to nothing from families. This exacerbates educational inequities by allowing schools that serve wealthy families to offer programs and services that other schools are not able to provide. Imagine a world in which we funded public schools not out of scarcity, but out of abundance, such that wealthy families did not feel the need to pour additional dollars into their child’s school. That is the world that students deserve, because that is a world where educational equity begins to become a real possibility.

As I listen to my fellow LSAT members from other schools in my ward and beyond discuss their annual budget allocation decisions, what I hear is that there is never enough. What I hear is that annual budget allocations consistently fail to keep pace with payroll increases, enrollment increases, inflation, and other drivers of rising cost, so that even what looks like an increase over last year’s budget often turns out to be, in effect, a decrease in spending power, necessitating further cuts to a budget that is already insufficient.

In Washington DC, in 2022, this should not be the situation in which we find ourselves. In order to move towards the educational equity which is our moral imperative, in order for targeted funds to truly and fully serve and support the students they are designed for, in order to uphold our political duty to make a quality public education available to every student regardless of socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, ability, zip code, or any other factor — we must take a hard look at the baseline budgets we are offering to schools, identify the many ways in which they fall short of meeting the true baseline needs of those schools, and immediately find a way to make up that difference, with a commitment to doing so on an ongoing rather than a one-time basis.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Good evening. My name is Stephen Kletter and I am a practicing economist who has lived and worked in the District for over 25 years. I have two children that attend Jackson-Reed High School.

Over the past few years I have spent an enormous amount of my own time deciphering the old and new DCPS school funding budget models. Using my training in economics, I have identified significant problems with both models and I have shared my results with senior DCPS staff on multiple occasions and have testified before the city council.

A serious problem with the old CSM budget model was that it dramatically underfunded large schools, even after accounting for differences in student needs. For example, this flaw in the CMS budget model underfunded Alice Deal Middle School by over $2 million per year and the Alice Deal LSAT called upon DCPS to fix this chronic problem. To its credit, DCPS itself explicitly recognized this problem in its Summer 2020 budget presentations. However—and this is really disappointing—when the new DCPS budget model was unveiled for FY23, this fundamental problem was left completely unaddressed. As a result, many students in our city—including those that attend Alice Deal, CHEC, and Jackson-Reed—will continue to receive inadequate general educational funding simply because they attend a large school. It is long past time for DCPS to fix this mistake.

Remarkably, the new DCPS budget model is even worse than its predecessor. The new model cuts baseline General Education funding for many elementary schools across the city and a few middle schools such as Alice Deal and Hardy. The funding cuts per student are by far the largest in the Jackson-Reed feeder system.

Many LSATs may be unaware the new model has cut their baseline funding. That’s because DCPS supplemented their total FY23 funding amounts with what DCPS refers to as “One-time Stability Funds.” If your school received One-Time Stability Funds for FY23, it means—and this is important—that the new DCPS budget model has determined that the school’s baseline funding should be cut dramatically. These stability funds appear intended to temporarily mask—in an election year—the inevitable baseline funding cuts for these schools that are scheduled to kick-in in FY24 and continue going forward for the foreseeable future.

To calculate your school’s new baseline funding under the new budget model, simply subtract your school’s total funding amount by the amount of One-Time Funds you received. For example, doing this simple math for Alice Deal reveals that its baseline funding will be cut $750,000 relative to FY22.1 And when you properly account for lost purchasing power due to

Kletter – Public Statement for DCPS Budget Hearing – 11.16.2022

inflation, the true drop in baseline funding at Alice Deal is over $1 million.2 The pain, however, will not be felt until FY24 when the One-Time Funds disappear. Alice Deal received $1.8 million in One-Time funds, so next year it faces a fiscal cliff that could result in the elimination of a whopping 16 fulltime teaching positions.3 This is simply unacceptable and the new budget model must be fixed.4

Similarly, the elementary and middle schools that feed to Jackson-Reed High School collectively will lose $8.8 million in annual funding when One-Time Stability Funds are eliminated in FY24. This fiscal cliff represents a whopping 10% funding cut for the feeder system and will necessitate the elimination of nearly 80 fulltime teaching positions. Again, this is simply unacceptable and must be fixed.

I have attached a presentation that outlines this funding problem in detail. Thank you for your time and hard work.
Sincerely,
Stephen Kletter

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1 Alice Deal received $16.7 million in total FY23 funding but $1.8 million of that amount was in One-Time Stability Funds. Excluding the One-Time Funds, Alice Deal’s true baseline funding under the new model is $14.9 million. That represents a drop of $750,000 as compared to FY22 where Alice Deal received $15.7 million.

2 Remarkably, total General Education funding (i.e., non-needs based) at Alice Deal has fallen by nearly $1.2 million ($1.9 million when inflation adjusted) relative to FY20. On an inflation-adjusted basis, this represents a drop of nearly $600 per student. These reported funding cut amounts are very conservative (due to FY23 submitted budgets underreporting ELL and SPED funding) and thus the true total cut to General Education funding at Alice Deal over this period is likely closer to $2.4 million on an inflation-adjusted basis.

3 The new budget model continues to penalize Deal for being a large school. Deal receives the lowest General Education funds per student of any school in DCPS (tied with Lafayette).

4 As mentioned above, Alice Deal had been chronically underfunded under the old budget model, so it was already starting in a funding hole.

See appendix below…