New DC Public Schools Budget Model Makes Progress Towards More Transparency and Flexibility, but Falls Short on Addressing Structural Funding Inadequacy and Inequity

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DCFPI Recommendations to Council and Mayor: Ensure that schools have enough local, recurring dollars to cover rising costs in FY 2023. • Transparently provide additional ESSER funds to allow schools to invest in targeted resources that help boost the academic outcomes of Black and brown students and students from families with low incomes. • Ensure that schools do not lose staff positions in a manner that is disproportionate to grade level projected enrollment declines. • Add a small school supplemental weight to DCPS’ new budgeting model to ensure that schools with declining enrollment can afford general education services without having to supplant “at-risk” funds. • Create and enforce a District-wide education vision that protects enrollment in neighborhood schools in all eight wards.

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Performance Oversight of DCPS before Council COW

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In sum, the Mayor’s 5.9% increase to the UPSFF base probably offered opportunities – unfortunately not taken -- to solve three big problems with local school budgets: First, give schools enough money to prevent their having to cut staff and other resources to keep up with rising costs. This did not happen for a majority of schools..

Second, correct the big differences among schools in per pupil spending for General Education by leveling up the lower funded schools. But next year’s budgets are actually worse with contrasts between similar size schools rising to as much as $5,000 per pupil

Third, stop the historical diversion of at-risk funds from extra services for at-risk students to basic general education program in many schools, which particularly affects schools with high numbers of at-risk students. With many schools suffering cuts in general education, that they will have to use their at-risk funds for functions such as music, art, attendance counselors, office staff, continuing to cheat at-risk students of extra services to which DC law entitles them.

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Mary Levy: Bill 24-570 “Schools First in Budgeting Amendment Act of 2021” and Bill 24-571 “Schools Full Budgeting Amendment Act of 2021”

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Thank you for introducing these bills. I have worked on the methodology and analyzed DCPS local school budgets for about 25 years. DCPS’ current system has multiple flaws and inequities. These bills do not purport to address them, nor do they address concerns about general underfunding, but that is all right. The sources of the inequities and insufficiencies are complex, and one cannot expect to solve all problems at once in one piece of legislation.

What the bills do seek, in a meaningful way, is to address the funding instabilities that have plagued schools for years. I have prepared simulations of the effect of both bills with the only data currently available: What would the results have been if either had been law governing the calculation of this year’s budgets?

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DCFPI Testimony on CM Mendelson's Budget Bills

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DCFPI appreciates Chairperson Mendelson for introducing legislation to “end the annual school budget crisis” of unstable and unpredictable initial school budgets that DC Public Schools (DCPS) releases each winter. We have long advocated for the city to adopt more common-sense budgeting practices as a tool to promote educational equity in the District. However, neither bill adequately addresses existing funding inequities or reins in DCPS’s illegal practice of supplanting school budgets with “at-risk” funding. DCPS hurts schools educating high percentages of low-income students—the majority of whom are Black and Latinx—the most with this practice.

Furthermore, the bills, as written, raise more questions than they answer. DCFPI recommends that the Committee of the Whole:

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Henderson: School Budgeting Bills B-24-570 and B24-571

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I appreciate and support the idea of funding the needs of schools first, and central office second, as well as the goal of providing budget stability for DCPS schools. I have two main areas of concern regarding the bills. The first is that it is unclear, to me at least, how the provisions of these bills will be affected by or interact with the new DCPS budget formula. DCPS has not been forthcoming with details about the new model, offering too few examples to get a sense of their underpinnings as well as using examples that have no reasonable likeness to an actual DCPS school (their high school example is of a 2,500 student school – Wilson, DC’s largest, has fewer than 2,000). Bill570 is oriented towards UPSFF funding, we don’t know exactly how that fits into the new model.

Transparency and predictability would be helpful qualities of a funding formula, but the formula itself needs to be adequate and equitable, and we don’t know yet that it is either. School support funds also need to be allocated equitably. Having a funding floor for year‐over‐year changes is desirable, but that floor has to be at the level needed to adequately and robustly fund our schools.

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EmpowerEd Testimony School Budget Bills Hearing

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Good Afternoon Chairperson and Council Members. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the Schools Full Budgeting Amendment Act and the Schools First in Budgeting Amendment Act. We approach this conversation with two important guideposts- how do we provide our schools the stability they need and how do we ensure equitable budgets that truly provide each school community with what that specific community needs. Both of these bills are aimed at the first objective, providing schools more stability, but do not address how to make budgeting more equitable. I must say upfront the timing of this hearing provides a difficult context. DCPS is currently undergoing a process to modify their longstanding budgetary approach with a mixed formula approach that in theory will center equity- but for which we have not yet seen simulations with actual schools. Without that context, it becomes difficult to judge how these separate efforts would interplay with a new budget model and what the ultimate results would be for school communities.

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Alpert Ward 2 Ed Council Testimony on B24-0570 and B24-0571

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As a general supporter of executive discretion, in theory, I think budgets should be formed by DCPS with input from principals and parents. But the way schools cower in fear of sudden cuts even during flush times for this city does not work for our schools. Further, the process of rolling out a new budget model over the last year and beyond is so egregious in its secrecy and contempt for the council and for parents that the council must act.

I’d much prefer to work on issues collaboratively with city officials, as opposed to in opposition. That was my strategy for transportation and planning advocacy in the past, and I found it to be an effective one. We want the same things - successful and equitable public education serving the children of DC.

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DC SHAPPE: Council Hearing on the Schools First Budgeting Amendment Act and the Schools Full Budgeting Amendment Act of 2021

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support the intent to ensure that DCPS schools are stable, able to expand programming and meet the needs of their students and families. I acknowledge the Council is working to solve a problem that has been persistent.

The first issue before the Council, not dealt with yet, is the way we fund public education effective, efficient and fair? We have policy that does not limit the number of schools, incentivizes families to exit rather than invest and in the name of neutrality does not prioritize its own DCPS system of right.

Today, considering the Schools First Budgeting Amendment Act, It is premature for us to recommend changes of the magnitude recommended without knowing more about the DCPS budgets for this year and thus as proposed in these bills for perpetuity.

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Laura Fuchs Council Testimony Bill 24-570 “Schools First in Budgeting Amendment Act of 2021” and Bill 24-571 “Schools Full Budgeting Amendment Act of 2021”

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We have said it before and clearly we will have to say it again: Budgets are moral documents and are the foundation upon which our education programming is built. It is simply not possible to achieve our ambitious and important equity goals without equitable funding. And as we have seen time and time again, equity cannot be achieved if left up solely to a Mayor and their central office team – it must be inclusive of the stakeholders and those who are actually implementing the policy – and we cannot operate in the dark.

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