City Council - Education Committee Hearing on Docket #0200

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Good afternoon, everyone. For the record, my name is Julia Mejia, at-large city councilor, and I also happen to be the chair of the Boston School Committee, Lord have mercy, the Boston City Council's Committee on Education. Today is March 2nd, 2026, and the time is 2.05. This hearing is being recorded. And it's also being live streamed at boston.gov slash city-council-tv and broadcast on Xfinity Channel 8, RCN Channel 82, and Files Channel 964. Written comments may be sent to the committee email at ccc.education at boston.gov and will be made part of the record and available to all counselors. Public testimony will be taken at the end of this hearing or if not people or at the beginning.

Individuals will be called in the order in which they signed up and will have two minutes to testify. If you are interested in testifying in person, please add your name to sign up at the sheet near the entrance of the chamber. If you are looking to testify virtually, please email our central staff liaison, Meg Karbanoff at meg.kavanagh at boston.gov. for the link and your name will be added to the list. Today's hearing is on docket 0200 in order for a hearing on BPS staffing program impacts. This matter was sponsored by My colleagues, Councilor Murphy, Councilor Flynn, and Councilor Fitzgerald. I was referred to this committee on January 28th, 2026. Today, I am joined By my colleagues in order of arrival, Councilor Murphy, Councilor Flynn, Councilor Pepén, and Council President Breadon. Anyone else?

And then I also want to acknowledge that we received a letter of absence from Councillor Santana and just wanted to note that for the record. And I will read his letter into the record. Dear Chair Mejia and colleagues of the Committee on Education, I regret to inform you that I am unable to attend today's hearing on Docket 0200 to discuss the impacts of Boston Public Schools hiring and spending freeze on our students, educators, and school communities. I would like to express my gratitude to Chair Mejia for holding this hearing and Councilor Murphy for sponsoring this docket. I look forward to reviewing the valuable insights from the discussion and the committee's report and recommend the next steps. I am committed to working with my colleagues to ensure that our schools can continue supporting their employees and providing an accessible, high quality education for our students. Sincerely, Hendry A. Santana, Boston City Councilor at Large.

All right, so I also, we're going to do things a little bit different. Normally we have two panels, but you know, anything that is in my committee is always non-traditional, right? So we're just going to bring everybody together. Is that okay? Great. So I'd like to introduce today's representing the administration is David Bloom, the Chief Financial Officer for Boston Public Schools. And we also have Mary Tamer, who's the Founder and Director of Mass Potential. Later we'll be joined by Ross Wilson, who's the executive director of the Shaw Foundation. So before we get started, I'm going to Turn it over to the lead sponsors for any opening remarks.

Thank you. Thank you, Chair Mejia. And thank you. I know we were scheduled last Monday and we had a snowstorm. So instead of going Zoom, I thought it would be better in person. I prefer in-person conversation. So thank you for switching around your schedules to get here. This hearing order was filed. I know that I have filed, I think, eight. Hearing Orders or 17F so far this term related to BPS. A lot of ongoing advocacy I've been doing since I came on the council. and we're heading right into budget season just this morning with the chair of ways and means we had another working session kind of working through concerns about You know, the upcoming budget. But for me, this was a specific one. And I was happy. Thank you, Council President Breadon, that this one was placed in the Education Committee. Many people thought, you know, maybe it should go into Ways and Means.

I think this conversation really needs to be grounded in not just the numbers, which we'll have plenty of time and conversation to have those hearings and really Thank you. Thank you. They needed to get their budget for next year ready that they were going to have to make some hard choices. So teachers and staff and families and even students were reaching out, hearing that they were losing positions or losing funding, stipends, you know just different ways that each individual school finds ways to educate and you know really wrap services around our students. So I'm just looking forward to having just kind of an honest conversation about what does 53 million mean? When is it going to be?

Is it right now we're already cutting stipends and not being able to finish out a year where we're paying for professional development or field trips? And I know also questions around how many teachers or educators are actually getting laid off. The number is somewhere, you know, 200, 300. Are we including our provisional teachers, knowing that they're not guaranteed a job? So just questions around that. And obviously grounded in what are our schools going to look like in September? And is it going to be drastically different based on this shortfall that we're seeing? So thank you, Chair. I'll save my questions and more conversation after we hear from both of you. So thank you for being here.

Thank you, Councilor Murphy. And before we continue, I just want to note for the record that we have been joined by Councilor Louijeune and Councilor Weber. Anyone else? Great. and just in the sake of, Councilor Flynn, any opening remarks? Councilor, President, Breadon, Pepén, my colleagues, anyone else would like

Thank you Madam Chair and honored to partner with Councilor Murphy and Councilor Fitzgerald on this important discussion and what impact these cuts will have on students and schools. I was at the Joseph Lee School with Councilor Mejia and with Councilor Murphy last week for Black History Month talking to students and parents, and they were concerned about What impact the budget will have on this school? I was also on a conference call recently with Council Mejia. We were talking to students. We were talking to parents and to and to teachers at the Mel King Academy. And we want to know what impact potential budget cuts will have on this school.

I want to make sure we do our due diligence to ensure that students have the right resources and support to get a decent education, especially students of color Students with Disabilities. I think these are important questions, and I'm going to continue to advocate for those students and for their parents. In my opinion, this is a civil rights issue. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Councilor Flynn. I want to note for the record that we've also been joined by Councilor Fitzgerald, who is one of the original co-sponsors, as well as Councilor Worrell. Councilor Fitzgerald, you now have the floor.

Thank you, Chair. I very much appreciate you holding this hearing. Yeah, I think what I'm just looking to find out is knowing, right, the news that's out there and being a BPS parent to three kids myself and some of the other Parents not only at that school but also from schools around the district coming up to me asking what these cuts mean, what is the effect in the classroom, even things of the nature of like, Wait, can we still go on field trips if, you know, I heard there was a freeze on things like that? So even down to that granular level, hoping you can sort of put it in a digestible manner for us that we can report back as best we can. and help you guys figure out whatever it is we need to figure out to make sure we're delivering for our kids. So thank you guys for being here. Appreciate it, Chair.

Thank you, Councilor Fitzgerald. And just wanted to just say that this hearing is going to focus on the Boston Public Schools staffing and program impacts. As Councilor Murphy uplifted, the district is currently managing a projected $53 million deficit, and the staffing allocations are a central part of how this gap is going to be addressed, specifically around programming. and so this is an opportunity to better understand how the staffing model is going to work and what changes are being implemented and how those adjustments are going to be Thank you. Thank you. and many more.

Thank you. Awesome, so why don't we just dive right in, unless anyone else, I know that my colleagues waived opening remarks, so just the lead sponsors, so we're good to go. So why don't we start off with... Mr. Bloom, you now have the floor and 20 minutes.

Thank you, Chair, and I hope to not take 20 minutes, so I'll try and be brief so we can focus on your questions. So thank you everyone for having me here today and giving me this opportunity to speak. For those who don't know me, who are maybe watching, my name is David Bloom. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for the Boston Public Schools. My materials today will give a quick update on the FY26 budget and specifically some projected shortfalls that we communicated to the school committee in December. It sounds like maybe we'll have some conversation as well about impact for FY27, but we are also coming back for a working session on Thursday that we'll go into that in more detail.

In December, we brought to the school committee an approximately $50 million projected overrun. Just to clarify, this does not mean we were $50 million sort of in the red in that moment. But it simply meant that if we continued at our current spending rate with what we understood about the budget, we would finish the year over budget by about $50 million. In particular, when we were looking at the cost of services in these five main areas, health insurance, transportation, special education out of district costs, food services, and full-time employees, We saw cost overruns higher than our budgeted amount in our projections. Sorry, looking at two things, apologize.

So as soon as we saw this information, we started working aggressively to manage our budget. One of the challenges we face is that it's really hard for us to do projections on spending before September when we get the best data on the number of staff we've hired and everything else that's filled for the start of school. So the month of September and data from September is our sort of first data point to understand them. Early indications in September data suggested that some of the things we presented to school committee were true. While we needed to take some more time and look at the data from October to confirm, we brought that information to the superintendent and identified the need to start by tightening our belts at central office in particular to start to bring down our rate of spending. So the first thing was a pause of central hiring

Stipends and contract spending. This does not mean a universal freeze by any means. Spending directly related to students was still allowed to continue. So we did not pause, for example, centrally hire related service providers for special education. We also launched deep reviews of transportation facilities and food service budgets to make sure we could identify areas of cost savings relative to our initial projections. We also did an IEP review because they were projected higher than expected special education costs to ensure appropriate assignment of staff and services to students. And then with schools that were significantly under enrolled, we did some management of positions.

What that means is there were some schools that were significantly under enrolled where maybe they had a teacher go on leave or a position become vacant. And we worked with the school to understand, would it be possible for them to cover that leave or vacancy internally due to under enrollment instead of hiring an additional staff member? If staff were required, they were allowed to be hired. Sorry, keep looking at the wrong place. So as we got better data about our costs, specifically the data from October and November, the second and third month of our fiscal year, we realized we would need to be more aggressive in our cost management strategies.

We presented information on the budget to the school committee and worked with a variety of stakeholders to come up with another round of cost mitigation strategies. This included a broader pause on vacant positions at dependent contractors in both school-based and central office. A pause on discretionary spending, including new contracts, certain types of supplies, equipment, travel, and stipends. And for schools, we had said anything that had been submitted prior to the new year would be approved regardless. In order to be able to keep our operations running smoothly, we created a number of exemptions to the boss. So, for starters, direct service school-based staffing was exempted. Goods and services for unhoused students were exempted.

Enrichment activities such as field trips, athletics, before and after school programs, and external partnerships were exempted from the POS. End-of-year activities for high schools like prom, graduation, yearbook were exempted. Translation and interpretation and other legally required activities were all exempted. For the council's reference, I've provided some communications and FAQs that went out to staff about these pauses with a more detailed description. I do also just want to clarify one really challenging thing about the timing of all of this. The broader pause and Communication to School Committee coincided with our distribution of our upcoming school year's budget.

The unfortunate nature of the timing of our budget process means there's really no way to avoid talking about two years at the same time. We are aware that this caused a fair amount of confusion in our school communities, as some schools heard that they might be losing a position for next year and were concerned that it was connected to the pause or somehow happening in the current. What we've tried to ensure staff and community members in our schools is this pause is not resulting in any layoffs of any staff in the current year, right? There are no current year layoffs because of this pause and no required student facing positions or all required student basing positions are exempted, right, can continue.

And so I'm really glad to have this opportunity today with the Council, your Chair Mejia's leadership, to be able to clarify for you and for the community more about what's happening with our budget this year. So, thank you, and I'll turn the rest of my time back to you, Chair.

Thank you. Can you, before we get started to the round of questions, can you, for the record, just for those who are tuning in, reiterate the timing? like because there's so much confusion. Of course. So you could just say for this academic year that's starting in September, right?

Yeah.

Or whenever it starts? Yep, that's right. So can you just September 2026 through, June 2027. Can you just reiterate from just because I think folks who are tuning in may be a little bit confused. So for the record, can you just explicitly state that.

Yes, so for the The materials I've just provided are for the current school year, which began in September of 2025 and will run through June of 2026. Sorry. Separately, we've communicated information about budgets for next school year starting in September of 2026 running through June of 2027. The exemptions and pauses that I mentioned are all for the current school year. So school year 25 and 26. reductions in staffing and any layoffs or non-renewals of staff would be as part of our FY27 budget process starting in September of 26 through Excuse me, through June of 26. So any layoffs or staff reductions are for the upcoming school year starting in September.

So then that's where I'm a little bit confused because I I thought you said it wasn't going to happen until the following. So it's starting 2026, not 2027. So the 26-27 school year, I apologize, I refer to that as... Yeah, because I just want to make sure, because I don't want, I don't, listen, I'm trying to make sure that we get this right.

Of course.

And if I'm not understanding it, I know that the people that follow me aren't understanding it either. 100%. So let's clear it out.

So the projected deficit I'm referencing is for school year 25-26, the current year we're in. The reductions in positions that have been discussed and that Councilor Murphy was mentioning earlier are for the school year 26-27 year that will start in September.

So then people should still be worried about losing their positions because in a few months, those cuts are going to impact?

Yes.

Okay, so then that is true? Yes. Okay, thank you. All right, so Councilor Murphy, thank you.

You saved me some time because that was my first one. Just for you to clarify that more, because I know it gets confusing to people about what the years mean. And when you say the layoffs and firing aren't going to happen, all we're saying is we're not going to currently tell a teacher Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A lot of people don't realize is also currently so you mentioned some of the exemptions but there's other cuts that will happen so if you could just Go more into what does it mean when you say stipends?

Because stipends for different schools and different principals can mean a lot. For many schools, it's Professional Development, which is necessary, especially if we want the inclusion rollout to be successful for our students and our teachers. It's not, even though I'm a big proponent of field trips, it's not just this idea that stipends are just for field trips.

No, of course.

Many times it's before and after school programming. It's tutoring for students happening outside of the school day. If teachers are working during their free lunch PD, which I hope they don't, that they're being compensated, which they should. And now principals are no longer able to provide those services to students if they can't continue out the year. So do we have a list of school by school which stipends they are not going to be able to now continue to provide? Because that directly correlates to like a service to a student.

I really thank you so much for the question. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify this. So any stipends that had been submitted before the date, so before 12-31-25, will continue to be paid and be paid out in full. So if a school set up a tutoring program for the year that met on Saturdays, some schools do Saturday academies. and they submitted paperwork to the central office in August or September and said, you know, these five teachers are going to run a Saturday academy for the rest of the year through June. That is going to continue to be honored and paid.

What if they wrote it, though? Because many principals don't file everything at the beginning. We don't file all of our hearing orders in January. We kind of spread them out. So many principals say, well, I didn't finish filing out my stipends. We have a second round. Different teachers want to participate. So I don't think it's really accurate to say that most principals, because I'm hearing from a lot of principals, had I known that we needed to just put it all in at once.

I mean, it is really difficult, right, that there are certain things that we are going to stop. We're not going to be able to do that we would have otherwise done. But any commitment that has been made through our process will be honored. So if a school has issued the stipend, we will continue to honor that.

But many staff members were told by their principal they were promised that position. They weren't worrying how they were getting paid. They were told, now they're being told You no longer can be, like you mentioned, maybe the Saturday tutor or the after-school program because I can no longer provide that service. So it is impacting staff right now, continuing out the year. Contract spending, it came up a few times already in our Ways and Means hearing. I know that many of our related services are contracted through Easter Seals. Is that one of our contracts? Thank you.

Paws would be sort of new contracts that hadn't already been issued.

Could you share like four or five contracts that we pay out in BPS so we have an idea of what these contracts are?

The tricky thing is the contracts that I list would be the ones we have, and those will continue to be paid.

but there must be contracts that were about to be signed because you know the cost savings that's why you cut them right which ones were not signed yet so

I think the challenging thing is most of our contracts are signed for the full school year, right?

So how much cost saving did we get by stopping all contract spending throughout the year?

I can pull that number over.

And while you're pulling that up, I have a question about, I get the management of positions based on the September enrollment. Once you actually know how many students, there can be an adjustment. But the IEP review to ensure appropriate assignment and you listed The costs related. Why would that ever change? Aren't we always providing all of the full services on an IEP so there should never need to be I think it's always worth doing a review.

I think the thing we were confirming and double-checking is to ensure that as the year goes, a student might have a re-eval on their IEP and services might change, and that those staff or services are appropriately being reassigned to other students who need them. So for example, a student with a one-to-one paraprofessional who may no longer need it according to their IEP, that one-to-one should be assigned to a different student even in the middle of the year.

I know you were looking that up. I'm out of time. I will go to my second round because I'm really interested in why we need to spend $8 million more in transportation. But that's a different question. Thank you. I'll wait for my next round. Thank you. Do you want to wait? Mr. Bloom, did you find that?

Once you find it.

Yes, I am. It's in progress. I will get it for you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Flynn. You have five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Chair. BPS is facing a number of enormous structural issues such as aging school buildings, declining enrollment, little recovery from COVID-19. We have a deficit now. David, what caused the deficit? Was it unexpected bills that came, not able to predict what would happen? or was it mismanagement?

I think our overrun came from a couple of factors. So the first was health insurance costs coming in higher than expected. There were a few things that happened there. rate increase that we ultimately ended up paying per employee was higher than we had expected as we went through the budget process. The second thing that happened was more of our employees as a percentage are using our health insurance than have historically. And finally, the total number of staff increased Our vacancy rate went down. So our staffing rate increased despite overall projecting a roughly flat number of positions. And so that had an impact both on Salaries, which is one of the other items that you'll see, but also health insurance costs.

Let me go to health insurance. We had a hearing here the other day. Lou Mandarini was here, and that's what he talked about. Most of the time was the cost of healthcare for city employees. Just give me a quick number. How much are we spending on BPS employees This year for healthcare costs? Approximately $151 million. How much did we spend the last year, the previous year?

Last year, I will confirm that it was... Probably more like 135. 135. Let me get you the better number, though.

Okay, what are we gonna spend, what are you projecting we're gonna spend this next year?

Our upcoming year number is Projected to be just over $168 million.

$168 million, so almost going up $20 million. Are we spending a lot of money on weight loss drugs?

Um, that is, I, so you're, you're getting right to the edge of my understanding, but yes, my understanding is we are spending a lot of money on those drugs.

So that, that 20 million, 20 million dollars, a good portion of that is weight loss drugs.

This is where I'm not as familiar with the details of the exact expenditures, but I have been made aware that a significant proportion of it is on the weight loss drugs, yes.

Okay. There was some speculation that a drop in state aid caused by BPS declining enrollment was responsible for the FY26 deficit. Is that true?

The current year deficit was not directly caused by a drop in state aid because our general fund appropriation is appropriated by this council annually and does not change if the It would impact the city's general fund balance overall, but it would not directly impact the school department's budget.

In December 2025, the school committee Officials and BPS in City Hall were aware of the overspending. So I'm just trying to get the dates accurate. The school committee said the FY26 deficit was around $50 million, or $49 million, and then in January 29, several weeks later, they said it was $53 million. So about a $4 million increase. How did it increase so much so fast?

It's $4 million.

In a couple of weeks, that's a lot.

It's in about, it was a month difference.

A month, yeah, okay.

It was the difference between our October projections and our November projections. And essentially what happened was our run rate on spending for staff increased slightly as schools sort of finalized some additional hiring. and we ended up hiring some more substitutes in long-term positions than we had in the prior month. It is not necessarily unusual for us to see that variation From December to January in one year, what is unusual is the deficit that it's building upon.

Why is our transportation cost going up so fast?

So our transportation cost is going up for a few reasons. One is, of course, our collective bargaining agreement with the bus drivers, which does have a cost as well as payments we're making to external contractors for other work. But one of the other significant costs is the cost of on-time performance, right? So the more routes you run, The final thing I would just say for transportation is Thank you, David. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

I just want to also note that we've been joined by Councilor Culpepper. And David, before I go to the next co-sponsor, just for the record, again, can you just tell us what the entire operating budget is for BPS? And then I also would like for you to, for the record, the exemptions that you listed in your presentation, is that for all upcoming school years or just this particular year?

So those are, I'll go in reverse order. So the exemptions I listed are exemptions to the current year pause. Those things are then continuing for next year because those are allowable spending for next year when there is no pause plan.

So just so that I understand, these exemptions will always be exemptions This year, next year, and every upcoming year. Or just this year.

They are exemptions to the current year pause.

So next year, these will no longer be effective?

Because, yes, they will no longer be exemptions because they will be standards better.

Okay, so we don't have to worry about that?

We should not have to worry about that. Okay, great, thank you.

But can you tell us the total?

And then the current appropriation, which may be off very slightly because we have a Collective bargaining supplemental still in process is just over $1.6 billion.

$1.6 billion. $1.6 billion, yes. Is the total budget of our BPS.

Yes, that's the operating budget. There's also grant funding.

And how much is the grant funding?

Grant funding is currently at about $130 million.

Okay, so can you give me the total of that? Sure.

So our current budget, inclusive of that, is just shy of $1.8 billion, $1.77 billion.

It's almost $2 billion, if we want to round it off, for those folks who are not good with math, right? It's almost $2 billion. Almost $2 billion for BPS. Sure. Great, thank you. All right, I'll go to the third co-sponsor. Councilor Fitzgerald, you have five minutes.

Thank you, Chair. And hopefully we won't have to worry about rounding up because all of the students that grow up in Boston will be great at math in the future.

So we won't have to do that.

I appreciate, Chair, your question around the exemptions because that was one of my questions about, yes, that's for this current year, but what about going forward? I hope that those exemptions do not have to exist because they're part of the standard spending. That's great. In the inclusion model, talk to me about how this affects, and I understand that you probably have a tangential sort of understanding of this, so I hope you can answer it. I'll do my best. With the potential pauses, cuts, things of that nature and how it affects the classroom and the teachers, paras, aides in the classroom. What are we expected to see in a general ed class and any other type of class? I know schools provide different ones. But what is the understanding of what it would look like in the next budget year?

So I think the answer to what it looks like in the upcoming budget year is going to vary significantly by school. We have some schools that do a significant amount of co-teaching. We have other schools that have more of what we would call a resource inclusion model where teachers are pushing in or pulling students out. And their budget, it varies a lot based on the number of students with disabilities in the school. A school with a relatively smaller number of students with disabilities is more likely to do the sort of push in or pull out model. whereas schools with much higher levels are doing much more co-teaching because they have that higher level

Okay, so when we talk about bodies in the classroom, just for instance, I got a son, third grade, going into fourth grade, I assume it's an inclusion classroom, there would be One teacher, one para?

Well, let me just get the grades right because our rollout is going up to fourth grade next year. So you said third grade into fourth so I can answer. Okay. So in fifth and sixth grade next year, those are the only two grades in the old model of the default being a teacher and para, though a number of schools still already had other models that they were using. Overall, The number of teachers and paras we're planning to employ as a ratio to the number of students is about the same. What that means though, because we have enrollment decline, is there are going to be fewer teachers and paraprofessionals than there were. What that then looks like from your, We have some schools that are building inclusion

right they're adding teachers they're adding paraprofessionals we have a new type of paraprofessional we designed with the teachers union that are getting added we have other schools that are serving fewer students with disabilities or fewer students overall and are having to redesign their models And then we have a large number of schools that are in a very similar experience. So without commenting on an individual school, I'm going to give you a very unsatisfying answer, which is that it varies a lot. But overall, we're seeing more investment in inclusion as a district as we go through this process.

I think the important thing to reiterate there is that because sometimes parents here, we're going to be losing Paris, right? And the general perception now is, wait, you're rolling out more inclusion. and we're taking away parents. And that's the fear that we've seen in a lot of parents right now. But so it's important to denote the fact that It's because in a school with declining enrollment, because of the ratio, you will be losing paras, however,

It still should be the same education provided and the same... And it could be that maybe you'll get an additional teacher instead, right, because your school's model is changing slightly. could be there are fewer students who need those services. It'll really vary based on the school and the experience in that school.

Do we have any indication of enrollment for coming years or projections out of what we think it may be and how does that look with I don't think this will be the only year BPS has a budget issue, right? And so to understand, well, now if we start to increase enrollment at any point and we are short-staffed, and we have to add to it given the financial hardships. The long term plan I guess is what I'm sort of hinting at.

So long term, Boston has a structural enrollment deficit. We have smaller, there are fewer children being born to residents of Boston every year. And we have smaller groups of those students then moving through the system. This has been true. for basically my entire tenure at BPS of a decade. What has occasionally masked that truth is immigration, right? Students moving to Boston from other parts of the country and world. What we've seen recently is a change in student experience around immigration, shall we say. therefore a reduction in the number of new kids we're seeing right and so the structural deficit that BPS has had and continues to have is showing up more in the dealer right so without

New immigration or something that would change about our resident births, we would expect to see continued declining enrollment in BPS.

Gotcha. Well, I did my part adding three. I'm done there. Chair, thank you. I only could get to two. Yeah, please. It's enough. Chair, thank you so much.

Thank you. Just so that before I move on, just for clarity, So most of the budget cuts are going to be with the paraprofessionals. I'm curious, how much money have you trimmed off with central staff?

Sure.

So we're down about 150 full-time equivalent central staff.

Can you give me a dollar amount? I want dollar amounts for both. How much money were in central staff and how much money for support service staff?

I might have to come back to you for that one. Okay, so today. I'll write it down and I'll get my team working on it.

That would be helpful. I'm going to move on now to my colleagues in order of arrival. We are going to go to Councilor Pepén, followed by Council President Breadon, Pepén, then Councilor Louijeune, then Weber, Worrell, and Culpepper, just so that you know the order that you're going to come in. So, Councilor Pepén, you have five minutes, and we'll do a second round if need be.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you so much to the panelists for being here today. This is an important discussion involving our Boston Public Schools. I'm kind of piggybacking on Councilor Fitzgerald's point about David, you mentioned the consistent I wanted to ask how are you guys Thank you. Thank you. Less numbers coming into BPS. How does that go into your long-term facilities plan in terms of mergers and in smaller schools? And just, I wanna know, how are you guys looking at that in a long-term scale?

So first for your question about supports for our immigrant youth and other bilingual students who are in our schools. We are expanding our dual language programming. We're adding the new Cape Verdean Creole dual language program at the New Frederick, merged from the Co-op in the Winthrop. and we're continuing expansions at schools like the Blackstone and others. A little bit more technically each year, Our Office of Multilingual and Multicultural Education reviews each school's plan to provide supports to those students and make sure we have sufficient staffing One change in our new funding formula for next year is that we actually, rather than the world where we had a per pupil allocation, we now actually just review, use basically OMME's data on what schools need.

and that's essentially what we allocate to schools for that. Sorry, remind me quickly your second question. Long-term facilities. Oh, yes. So we need to do some additional data analysis on the impact of this most recent pandemic. The difficulty there is those decisions are a lot harder to undo. If we end up reducing capacity in a high school and then in three years we see more students coming, we can hire more staff in three years if we've If we've closed a building, it's a lot harder to sort of restart. And so we're trying to be much more thorough in our analysis of the potential impacts of the long term facilities plan. So I think there will be more analysis upcoming from the team that works on that.

Okay, that's good. And I bring that up because I've seen an example of merger in my district already where the Sumner and the Philbrook became obviously the new Sarah Roberts School and it's I mean, it's a big school and people love it. So I just, that for me is an example of a merger, but wanted to see a bigger picture citywide, what you guys were thinking about some time. I would love to stay up to date on what you guys put out there. Of course. On the second topic, I wanted to ask about specifically BPS athletic transportation. Transportation is always something I focus on. I know that the budget is immense. I have issues with trans dev, not necessarily BPS transportation. Shout out to Dan. I wanted to ask you, how do you guys prioritize or look at the middle schools and high schools that are currently struggling with

I think it was last week where I received an email from a school that their middle school basketball team season had to be suspended basically because of lack of transportation. That to me is concerning as someone that really benefited from BPS athletics and I just want to make sure that our students are receiving proper transportation.

Okay, so I'm not familiar with that one in particular, but I do know that resolving this issue of athletics transportation has been a priority for the district. We did work extensively on a process to have more backup transportation because per our contract, we want the priority to be for our unionized drivers through Transdev but having additional backup outside transportation vendors available as needed. So I know the team is working deeply on that. I'm not familiar with the most recent issue, and I would definitely get back to you on that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I could share that with you. Please. That would be very helpful to get some insight as to what happened there. But I just, it continues to be a topic. And again, running the BPS Transportation Department is something I do not envy. It is a big hurdle for that team, but we'll love to be a part of the conversation to help just make these situations better for those that depend on the BPS buses moving forward. So thank you, Dan. That's it for me, Madam Chair. I look forward to the continued conversation. Perfect.

Right on time. Good job. That's impressive. I need everybody to do that. Good job. So David, before we move on to the next question, I'm curious about, I'm going to always ask, The numbers for the athletics budget for transportation. Can you tell us what that is? Because that is, I see that as a service.

Of course.

That impacts the social and emotional well-being of students. It's not just the championships, but it does a lot. And so if our kids can't get to their games, that's concerning.

Yeah, so our standing budget line for it is about $40,000, so not very much, but what happens is over the course of the year.

Course of the season or for the year?

For the year. Right, but what happens over the course of the year is as we arrange for more trips, more money gets transferred into the line from various other places as we make more plans. So I'll have to double check that. Potentially, what's happened is some of the costs have been rolled into the main Transdev line versus the account that I can see, because that number doesn't make That number seems wrong.

Especially if the district has been working on trying to fix this problem.

That feels wrong.

That doesn't feel right to me. So why don't we just put that on my list of things. Because when you get to me, I want answers to all of those questions that I still... All right, so we're going to move on to Council President Breadon. You now have the floor.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Where do we start? The bilingual education, I see in the projections that there's a talk about like a 70, like reducing by like 77 teachers, is that? Am I correct in that? It's in the 70s anyways, thereabouts. You know, given that we have so many English language learners, it seems really counterintuitive that we're reducing our bilingual education teachers. I have great respect and really understand the value of ESOL. If you're trying to teach students academic material, having it be delivered in their own language is definitely preferable to maybe struggling if you have limited English skills.

to struggling to understand complex academic material if English is not your first language. So I would really love to try and understand. I think we threw the baby out with the bathwater way back when we It seems like dual language settings are basically sort of the Cadillac version of it and Not only should we be thinking about the cost of something, but also how much value are we getting for our buck. And given that we have such a diverse student community from all over, Where are we thinking on that? If kids aren't graduating from high school with the required credentials, certificates, or whatever,

Be able to find work or go to college and be successful, then we might as well all just go home at this point.

Yeah, so I really appreciate that. And I think, you know, the district is committed to continuing to expand true dual language We're continuing to increase positions in that part. Of the 77 positions you referenced, about half of them that are being reduced are coming from reduction in capacity for our students with limited or interrupted formal education. The reason for that reduction is we had significantly expanded this program during The amount of immigration we saw in the last administration. And we effectively just don't have enough students to maintain the programming. So in some schools, that means closing the program entirely and keeping it a different option in the neighborhood. Other schools it means reducing and reprioritizing to other programs. So about half of the 77 reduction is from that.

The other 30 something is coming from reduction in ESL staffing. This is also tied to a reduction in the number of students who are requiring ESL services. about a third of that reduction is coming from closed schools. So about 13 staff of the 30 something, and I'll get my exact number for you, are coming from either the Dever or Excel or another school that is closed or is closing grades. And so that leaves somewhere in the mid-20s in terms of the number of ESL staff we are reducing based purely on the number of students we're seeing in the district.

How many English language learners do we have across the system? Elementary and high school. I'll have to double check that number. I think it's pretty significant. It doesn't seem to make sense to me, and I take your word for it, but be given that English language learners... are consistently the students that really don't achieve their full potential in our school system. It seems counterintuitive that we should be reducing the teachers who would be best equipped to help them navigate the system. And then back on to something else. Transportation is a non-mitigated disaster. We spend $200 million on getting kids. I have one particular school in my district out in Alston Brighton The kids, like five out of seven days, the kids are arriving.

They're arriving late and they're being picked up late. So what does an on-time performance, the increase, you know, are we, The increased cost for on-time performance, how are we measuring that? Because I don't see an improvement in performance. It's like... We have teachers who have to stay until 6.30 in the evening with kids who would leave school at 3. They're hours late for being picked up. And parents are in danger of losing their jobs because they have to leave their jobs to go and pick their kids up.

I really sympathize with this as a parent myself with a kid at BPS school. I think on-time performance, if we look at the data on the number on-time performance rates. On-time performance has definitely improved from past years. Is it where we want it to be ultimately? No, I'm sure we always want it to be better. And I think in particular, the challenge as you've highlighted perfectly, Councilor, is it's not evenly spread. The issues with on-time performance are not evenly spread throughout the system, right? They're often concentrated in certain routes that are hard to manage. Someone who has to drive home at 4.30 to 5.30 every day through Boston traffic. Talk about unmitigated disasters. That drive is chaos. But I think we are working really hard to

use the data we're getting from routing from Zoom to make sure that we're improving on-time performance and improving our routing given the complexity of needs. And I think one of the other things We're working on is also just letting families know when they have good options closer to home because that's the main thing we're paying for is getting kids to school, right? If we can get school kids and higher quality high quality options that are closer to home then we save money on transportation and we make families happier. So that is also a key part of our strategy around this. It's not just improving the driving of the buses, it's also the assignment of students The creation of IEPs and every other step in the process.

Okay. My time's up, so thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. And just for the record, can you tell us how much is the BPS transportation budget? I think you should by now see the pattern here every time someone asks a question.

You should get yourself ready for the question that I'm going to follow up.

So make sure that you know that's coming.

Definitely sensing a theme.

Okay.

All right, and while you look for that, I'm going to move on to Councilor Louijeune. You now have the floor.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just wanted to follow up on a question. I guess I just want to say thank you because I know last two years I've been A big, big advocate for SLIFE funding for those classrooms with students with limited or interrupted funding because of what we saw happening in our school system. And those were coming in. And I had the same question as Councilor Breadon did when she asked about English language learners. But we have seen a significant decrease and our students using and needing SLIFE, which is why it's not a budget ask of mine this year because the need, I was at my elementary school this morning in Mattapan where you actually saw SLIFE classrooms, a lot of them catering to students from Alston, Brighton, because of the lack of slight classrooms around the city and because of the work of the district, we saw more slight classrooms around. But I understand that that accounts for some of the decrease in our English language learner.

One final question is, is some of that, the budget cuts, specifically in ELL, are any of those being moved to different line items?

Yes. Some of the... So some of the positions are recoded, so I think the... The total number I believe in our budget documents was 110 positions that are no longer coded to bilingual education teacher. But yeah, because of the recoding, it doesn't actually mean that. Right. So the 77, the Councilor Breadon reference, is the true reduction. So the remaining 33 were the recoding. And so... That then is sort of the main correlation. So 30 fewer ESL teachers, 33 less teachers in SLIFE, and then a few other teachers in smaller.

How many reduction in SLIFE? What is a reduction in SLIFE? 33. OK, thank you. A question regarding with respect to the school formula. The new reimagining schools funding It kind of holds back some money for more successful students to provide for transition funding for some of schools with the greatest losses. What is the plan after the two years of the transition funding to make sure that we are not just momentarily Thank you.

Thank you. I very much appreciate that. What I'll say is the schools receiving transition funding are limited to A very select number of schools that need a very specific funding. The funding is there for a very specific reason tied to something that is limited by time. So an easy example for me to give is the Frederick, merged Frederick School, has transition funding to keep two family liaisons. One from the CLAP, one from the Winthrop, where typically they would only have one, because we assign one per school. The reason for that is obviously the merger work is not just complete in this budget process, right? So they wanted a second year.

with that position to be able to ensure that the families are working through the transition, know the new place to go to school, are getting used to the routines of the new building, But it is a temporary support, and what we're trying to do is be very clear, both in our public documents and with the communities, about this is the temporary support you're receiving, this is why you're receiving it, and then this is why it would run out. There's only one school I can think of right now, maybe a second, that might be in line for a second year of transition support. And that basically has to do with that school's enrollment changing so significantly and over multiple years that they might see a big enough enrollment decline in two consecutive years to need a second year of transition support. but for every other school, I would think that one year is gonna be all they're gonna get. And what are those two schools?

The school in particular I'm thinking of is Charlestown High School. Okay. Where they have a relatively significant senior class, right? with a lot of needs for like advanced placement coursework and all the other things that seniors need in early college. They have amazing programming. But their freshman class is significantly smaller because of everything we're seeing going on.

Can you elaborate on that, everything we're seeing going on?

With the impact of federal policies on the district.

Okay, I get it, yep.

Charles Town was a very welcoming place for students. I just wanted to make sure that that's what you were talking about. And so next year, they're going to have a much smaller freshman and sophomore class than the junior and senior class. That's a significant enrollment change for them to deal with in one year. But the problem for them is they still have this big senior class. and a relatively large junior class. And so they're gonna see another round of sort of having to restructure and resize their school to get to the smaller level. That's the one place where I think there may be some need for a second year, but we won't really know that until next fall when we see what's going on with the school.

Thank you. We've cited enrollment decline as a primary driver of some of the staff reductions. Can you walk us through how the new funding formula distinguishes between declining enrollment loss and student need and how you're preventing the downward spiral of like a

Yeah.

Like, it's always, I mean, it's the hardest possible thing because, like, the fewer resources you put into a school, the less attractive they are. Maybe that is part of, in some way, part of the intent. I'm not saying that it is, but I'm just saying that in the conversation that Professor Pepén mentioned, a very important one about mergers, closures, all of that that needs to happen. but without intentionally doing this downward spiral. It's interesting.

Our new funding formula is designed in part to help solve that spiral problem. by making allocations for core staff fully funded and chunkier. So in weighted student funding, you would get a per pupil allocation you would need to buy elementary school classroom And if your school was under 87.5% full, Those classroom teachers wouldn't be funded. If you got an enrollment decline, you might still need the same number of elementary classroom teachers. You'd have less money, and so you'd end up cutting arts, music, social work, all those other things, right? make it less attractive to families. You see that cycle. So what happens now is the funding level is more stable as enrollment declines. and then sort of falls off in chunks as you're able to restructure the school to a smaller academic environment.

So, for example, a school that might be going from three strands down to two, right, from sort of 75 students per grade to 50, and many more. Their funding would shrink much more slowly in our new funding system than it would underway student funding until they hit the threshold to shrink that instructional block. Then their funding would decrease a bit faster for one year as they reduce that staffing. The downside of this, the trade-off we're making, is that it actually makes small schools more expensive per pupil. Small schools are generally tend to be more expensive. And it makes them even more expensive in this new model, which sort of highlights the challenge of declining enrollment, but without penalizing the students who are then in those schools. and so it does then lift up our need to have a conversation about small schools that are really expensive without taking as many resources away from the students in those schools.

Thank you. I have additional questions but I'll wait till the second round. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor Louijeune. Councilor Weber, you now have the floor.

Thank you, Chair. Sort of dovetailing on that, so for enrollment, I think the last enrollment projections were to be relatively stable and maybe be down like 3% by 2030 and then we were down 3,000 students in one year. So I guess what is the enrollment projection now out to 2030 and then have we changed the way

We definitely need to revisit that target and that pathway. We don't have an answer to that yet. What I would say is we have not redesigned our process for enrollment projections, but we continue to make sure we examine and correct any issues with it. What happened last year was a real... Challenge of timing. So we did our enrollment projections last year for the current year in October and November of 2024, right around the election. and what we had seen was the significant increase in immigrant and migrant youth lead to our enrollment stabilizing. So our enrollment had been flat. That was our most recent data. So our first round of projections done before the election had our enrollment projection pretty flat. And so the question becomes after the election, what do we do, right?

And the thing that we ultimately decided was We couldn't reduce enrollment projections and therefore school budgets and programs based on the sort of hypothetical situation of what the federal government might do. In the first Trump administration, it took a year. for us to see an enrollment impact of federal policy. In hindsight, obviously, it didn't take that long this time around. We ended up spending a bunch of money in classrooms and situations that ultimately didn't have the students because of federal immigration policy. But I think ultimately, The decision we made there to maintain the staffing in case the students came was the right one at the time.

Okay, and then in terms of the next year's budget, I guess I'm trying to get to what impact does this budget shortfall have on the planning for FY27? And one thing I point to is vacancies. How many vacancies were eliminated, for example, I think the reading line item for gen ed, I think that's reading specialist. I'm not sure. There was about 87 positions, but in FY26, there were only like 65, 66 of those that were filled. So for FY27, it's 62. So we're losing a couple of positions, but it's also down like 20 plus positions, I think. Can you just... To the overall point of how this budget shortfall is impacting our planning and you talk about vacancies.

I think there are two ways the budget shortfall impacts our planning. So one is, so Councilor Flynn had me walk through the health insurance spending. Right, so one of the challenges with our current budget is that for health insurance we

and do you have a number of the vacancies you've eliminated?

I don't have a full number of vacancies that were eliminated because for many of our vacant positions we are going to see staff bump into them, so a different position's getting eliminated, and then through our union process, someone else is going in. So our budget for health insurance this year was $134 million. We have a current year deficit, and then we have continued cost growth for next year. So our budget for next year is $168 million, even with some cost saving measures. So we're having to use $34 million of proposed new appropriation to correct our health insurance budget. So while that isn't a direct impact of the overspending on next year, It requires us to budget more for a single item. So that's essentially half of our proposed budget increase.

is going just to health insurance.

Can I just, so we had a hearing on, usually we go up $10 million a year in citywide health care costs. Next year we're going to go up $80 million. Yours is going up $34 million. Is there, I don't know, is there something, That's different from the BPS healthcare to make it more expensive.

I think that might be roughly our proportion of employees.

Yeah, I think there's about 10,000 to 20,000. Okay, so it may just be on proportion. I just had a... Breadon. Just another question. Councilor Breadon was talking about multi-language learners. In the budget book it talks about the office of multi-lingual and multicultural education. I think we all want to see kids, multi-language learners succeed. The number of that office, the budget amount is going down, I think, from about five to 3.5 million or so. and they're losing seven or eight FTEs. Is that like a central budget cut that we're making for next year? Does it reflect any? You know, the services that we're going to be able to provide to English language learners.

Yes, so, yeah, that is, so there's enrollment, or sorry, there's a FTE reduction in that office as part of our central budget cut and then a corresponding reduction in the budget as a result of that. We also are... reviewing and sort of trimming some other non-personnel spending as we try and sort of bring costs into control so we're you know they're they're Their central office budget is under review for reduction similar to others.

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Chair.

Okay, Councilor, I believe Councilor Worrell, you have five minutes and then. will be Councilor Culpepper.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the panel for being here. When, oh, you wrote out I think it's two or three rounds for balancing the budget and cost savings. What is the current cost savings for round one and do you have projected out what each Initiative, or each strategy could save BPS.

Yeah, so we're working through Each of the initiatives right now. So we started with the central office reductions. Those are smaller because most of the central office budget is in services directly provided to schools.

When you speak on that, can you tell us what was projected and what was actually saved?

Yes, so we're still working through our final calculations on the savings on that. I don't have a full, I couldn't give you an itemized list today, but I'll work to give you one as soon as possible.

All right. Will you be able to provide that for all the initiatives in round one and two?

Yes, we should be able to, yes.

All right. Yeah, I just wanted... Make sure that we keep an eye on that just in case the cost savings don't hit the projected cost savings that you're anticipating, then hopefully there's another strategy that we can I appreciate that, Councillor, and we'll certainly work to give you an update, a full update on the cost savings. How many vacant positions do we have now and do we have that broken out by position and also based on schools? Like how many vacant positions, nurses, paraprofessionals, teachers?

I believe that is one of the data points we're working on for your RFI for later this week. I will double check on that.

Okay. One of my other questions kind of goes off of what Council President Breadon brought up. was we have a very diverse student population. And our newer cohorts of teachers have been extremely diverse. When it comes to layoffs, how do we plan on navigating Layoffs to make sure that that diversity still exists to support our diversity diverse student population.

So I think the number one thing we're looking to do is you know keep as many of our educators in BPS as we can find a placement for so that would include sort of finding opportunities for teachers and paraprofessionals at other schools so our office of human resources has been working with each school leader to understand sort of the strengths of each employee who's impacted and then looking especially across the region as much as possible to identify sort of available jobs. As they come open.

Bless you. And then can you, when it comes to like big drivers for cost, I know you mentioned healthcare, also transportation. What has changed? Is it mostly volume, price, or was it just projection like budgeting? For the transportation or for all of them?

For all of them, right. Yeah, so for... transportation and health insurance it's been both volume and price for The personnel costs for staffing levels that had mostly to do with a reduction in our vacancy rate. So we did a good job hiring, which is great news. for the kids and bad news for me to manage. And so that effectively leads to additional costs there and that is part of what contributed to the health insurance. For special education costs, that's mostly about cost, but then there is some increase in services that we are seeing as well.

All right. No further questions right now, Chair. A lot of my colleagues have asked some of the questions I've had prepared. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor Worrell. I'm now going to reset my timer, and Councilor Culpepper, you have five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, and good to see you again. Just 60 days. A couple of questions with regard to reading supports. And you've heard the discussion about support for English language learners. In the material, it talks about literacy and how urgent literacy is. And when you look at the reading supports, it appears that while close to 70 FTEs were budgeted in fiscal year 26 for reading in general, Only 47 were filled, but the fiscal year 27 budget shows a loss of 2.8% FTEs in fiscal year.

27.

Yeah, I'm not sure the... So it wasn't actually that 47 were filled. That number has to do with more of the funding source changing for a number of positions. We had a number of reading positions that were initially funded on the general fund that ended up being funded by grant funds. How much was that? About 23 of them moved. So overall...

But how much in dollars was that?

At dollars, it was about $2.5 million. And that was for the 70 FTEs? Yes. So overall, across all funds, we budgeted just over 72 positions. And that stayed pretty constant through the year. and next year's budget has 70. So it's down two and a half.

But it says only 47 were filled. I'm not sure where that 47- It came from the school budget proposal that was sent to the council.

I'll have to double check that for you and get it back to you.

Right. Then it says the fiscal year 27, but it shows a loss of 2.8% FTEs. Oh, yes. 2.8 FTEs there, yes. Right. And so... If there were 70 budgeted and 47 were filled, what happened to the other 33?

I apologize, I'm not familiar with that particular number. I'll look it over and get back to you. From what I'm looking at, we've... We've maintained the same number of positions in

The 70 FTEs? Yes, across both of our funding sources, yes. But it says only 47 FTEs were filled. My question is, what happened to the other... 33. Because you're telling me that all 70 were filled. I apologize. I don't know how many were filled. Okay. I'm giving you what you gave us. 70 FTEs were budgeted. Yes. But only 47 were filled. The 33% the 33 unfilled positions would amount to how much?

What I see when I look at it is 70 positions were budgeted on... For FY26. For FY26. And then 23 of those positions were moved to external funds, but were... That does not mean they were vacant.

But it says only 47 were filled. That means they were vacant. The 33 were vacant. I'm just giving you what we got from you. I'm just saying, what happened to the other 33?

So why don't we do this, Councilor Culpepper?

That's all I'm saying. You can get back to me. Yeah, I'll get back to you.

You can get back to me on that.

Yeah, for sure. I want to make sure I get you an answer on that.

Right. And so, obviously, there's going to be a cut with regard to reading supports, right? Although we understand that, and the information we received was said that it's urgent. And then when I look at the alternative education and the students who are in the alternative education programs, alternative schools or at-risk alternative programs, It says that there's going to be steep cuts. Can you tell me what those steep cuts are?

For the alternative education budget?

Mm-hmm.

We had an alternative education program that was running at Excel High School. At where? At Excel High School.

Is that the community academy?

No, that's separate from the Community Academy. There is a reduction in Community Academy as well. We'll get to that in a minute.

No, we won't get that into a minute. I've got five minutes, sorry. Your time was up already. Oh, okay, okay.

Don't mind. But let me just, if I could just, if I could just.

Your time was up. And I was being gracious.

Can I?

No, no, I'm good, I'm good. But we appreciate you, but you'll answer that question and then you'll go to the second round.

Yeah, for the alternative education budget that you're referencing, the program that's being reduced there with about five staff was a program, I believe it was called AIP? at Excel High School. And that program is closing alongside the closure of the school. So that is the reduction in the alternative education budget that I believe you're referencing.

Can I just have one quick, real quick? In your second round.

Yes, you can. Save that thought.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate it.

Thank you. All right, David, I'm going to go to my questions, and then what I'm going to do is a little bit different. Instead of going to a second round with just you, I'd like the two panelists to do their presentation and then we'll do a second round, their first round and your second round together. So then that way we can all learn together. Is that? Whenever it works for you, Chair. Okay, great. Thank you. All right, so then let's just dive right in. Do you have any updates for me? And while you have, I have a few more questions that I want to ask.

Sorry. The number I have so far is $2 million for contract savings from central reductions, which was Councilor Murphy's question. I apologize. That's not an update for you. I am working on the central staff reduction number as well, but I don't want to eat into your time.

I waited to get my time going. The April 2025 BPS transportation report that was released by the administration and the superintendent Skipper claimed that in the line item that the report put on in bold that the new ridership procedural will lead to to operational and cost efficiencies for the 2025-2026 year budget. Has that happened?

I think we have seen some efficiencies.

Some like what? Specifically, what?

So I believe, I may have the number wrong, but it was either 1,000 or 2,000 students ended up with a reduction in ridership because the students weren't riding the bus. So without those, the cost would have been higher. I don't have an estimate for how much higher they would have been with those students, but that was definitely made a difference.

So whoever's paying attention will come back to me and give me some specifics. Okay, great. BPS provides estimates to the school committee for how much new collective bargaining agreements with their public sector unions will cost over the life of the contract, right? So can BPS officials break down How the $17 million in overspending on salary and benefits is proportioned between its 14 different bargaining units and how spending compares to the estimates provided at the time of the contracts were settled. because I know those things are still looming and there's been some talk about how this is going to impact. Can you tell me what that impact is going to be?

Yes. I don't today have the $17 million broken out by bargaining unit. But how about this?

Of that 17 million, which services will be impacted or supported?

So there won't be any changes to... Services as a result of the $17 million. It's just going to cost. We're going to have to find savings elsewhere to be able to pay for it.

And we're not going to find that essential staff?

I mean, yeah. This is the big part.

That's where we're going. We're going to cut essential staff. Is Boston planning on submitting an application to MSBA's core program, the new school building program in 2026? Because we're trying to figure out how we're going to get this money, right? And we're trying to also provide quality instruction and the best facilities. So I'm just curious. I'm sorry. I'm not privy to that right now. Okay. All right. So then let's go a little bit back to... You know some of the questions that I had. Do you know what the total is for the transportation budget for athletics. You said it was 40,000 earlier?

40,000 is the number in my public document. I think it's probably embedded in the trans-dev contract, and I'm going to need a little more time to break that out for you. But we'll get it for you.

And do you think that there is a discrepancy in terms of what gets reported publicly and what gets shared here? How can we streamline that a little bit more?

That's always something I'm definitely working on to improve it. I think Councilor Worrell conveniently sitting right there so I can thank him directly for his advocacy around the budget book, which has definitely helped make things more transparent. I think each year we're working on what we publish to try and make it clearer and more transparent. I think separating out athletic transportation is certainly something we can do better at.

Yeah. And was this something that you, for like the $53 million, Was this like, did you first see this coming?

I mean. It's a big chunk of change.

Yeah. So I'm just curious how we ended up here.

Yeah. Not while I was before you last year, I think. Over the summer, we started to get our first rounds of health insurance costs come in. And those numbers were very concerning. They were higher. Significantly higher as we have seen than I expected. And so we immediately started looking at those, having conversations with our colleagues at City Hall, making sure they were accurate and reflective. Our real challenges though is it's very hard for us to get an accurate sense of spending before the school year begins because hiring is happening right up until I was going to say September and then I paused to think about whether it was really October.

And a 1% change in our vacancy rate can have a $15 million swing on our overall budget. right so you know the fall was really when it became most clear that we were going to have this challenge and really it's there's a number of factors we monitor every year some come Under budget, some come in over budget, and unfortunately this year what we found is sort of everything we monitor is coming in over. So we're resetting some of our assumptions for the upcoming school year.

And I don't want to extend my time. I went over. So I'd like to just kick it over to our guests. panelists who are joining us today, Mary Tamer and Ross Wilson. I will give you each, or I'll leave you guys 20 minutes as a team.

It's very generous.

I was just joking. Yeah, you each have seven minutes as panelists, but I figured by the time they do questions and answers, but I was just joking. So seven minutes. and we'll start off with Mary. Mary, you have seven minutes.

Thank you, Councilor Mejia, and good afternoon, Councilors. I'm here today as a former member of the Boston School Committee but also as someone who believes deeply in the promise of Boston's children. I'm a former Boston public school parent, student, and longtime advocate of BPS and public education. and I attended the Boston Public Schools during one of the most difficult times in our city's history in the 1970s. As a child from a low-income bilingual home, so I deeply understand what is possible when schools work in the service of children and their families. My tenure on the Boston School Committee ended in 2014 and it has to be stated plainly Student achievement in our city schools is worse today than it was 12 years ago, and that decline has happened despite dramatically higher spending and staffing. In 2013-2014, the BPS budget was $1.1 billion. Enrollment was approximately 57,000 students.

We operated 125 schools with 7,100 staff members. Today in 2025-2026, the budget has grown to $1.5 billion Enrollment has dropped to 47,000 students, nearly 10,000 fewer children. We operate 119 schools, yet staffing has increased to 9,400 employees. We're spending $400 million more to educate 10,000 fewer students with more staff, and student achievement is significantly lower for the vast majority of students in our schools. For our most vulnerable students, the story is even more troubling. Students with disabilities are reading and performing math in the single digits. More than 80% of our black and brown students are not reading on grade level in third through eighth grade.

And in the eighth grade, only 9% of English learners are reading on grade level. These are not the statistics you're hearing discussed at school committee meetings or in speeches that purport to share the true state of our schools. We cannot call this progress and we cannot call this equity. And yet half of BPS seniors today are not on track to complete MassCore, the coursework required for admission to Massachusetts public universities. Completion of MassCore is correlated with higher rates of college completion. Other gateway cities, Lawrence, Springfield, New Bedford, among others, have reached 100% of graduates meeting Mass Corps standards. Why can't Boston? despite its claims to have met the benchmarks required by the state under a mandated improvement plan to avoid district-wide receivership. Boston had five years to prepare for this requirement, but we have failed. and it appears that at least one-third of BPS seniors may graduate this spring under a waiver that will render their diplomas meaningless.

If you are not aware, Mass Corps completion is the minimum requirement for a student to attend a state college or university. So our district has not prepared, minimally, one third of our students to even consider that option. Completing this curriculum, as the Globe wrote in a recent editorial, Having a consistent, rigorous standard for coursework benefits students. Boston, with five years to prepare, should have been able to better keep its students on track to meet that standard. Which brings me to the central issue of comprehensive alignment. You align your budget to your goals. That's basic governance. If your goal is literacy, numeracy, and college readiness, your budget should clearly and transparently reflect those priorities. But BPS is not tying its budget to what will actually move students forward. Here are the questions that both the school committee and the city council need to ask. What did we spend money on last year that didn't work? How will we spend that money differently this year?

What programs are producing measurable gains in student achievement and which ones are not? What are we transparently doing differently to turn around a district in crisis and decline? Does this collective bargaining agreement help student achievement, and can we afford it? We are now facing a budget deficit, a fiscal cliff that did not happen overnight. It's the result of policy choices and poor planning. Three months into this school year, leadership knew we were over budget, yet it was not raised until December. How often is the school committee reviewing actual spending versus projections? Where is the ongoing fiscal oversight? And let's talk about investments. The hub school model, is it working? Are we seeing increased student achievement levels? If continued investment is requested, where is the data demonstrating results? Partnerships. Which ones are yielding measurable gains? Are we continuing partnerships that are not boosting student outcomes? Alternative education programs.

How many are we operating? Can they be streamlined? Mel King Academy has roughly 80 students and 41 staff members. Proficiency in reading and math is 0%. Chronic absenteeism is about 60%. On most days, the building has handfuls of students present. How do we justify that level of spending, $15 million this year, without a demonstrable academic return? High dosage tutoring. How many schools are actually implementing it? In which grades? How many students are being served? With literacy rates as low as Boston's, high dosage tutoring should be mandatory in every single building. High quality instructional materials. Continuing the use of focus as an early literacy program is nothing short of malpractice. It is not HQIM despite the fact that families are being told it is.

It is not peer reviewed and it is definitely not helping Boston students learn how to read. The numbers speak for themselves. We're spending more money than ever before. We have more adults per student than we did in 2014, and yet student outcomes have declined for nearly every subgroup. This is not about cutting for the sake of cutting. It is about clarity of purpose. It's about aligning resources with results. It's about demanding that every dollar move children forward. Because right now the numbers tell a hard truth. We are spending more and achieving less. And Boston's children cannot afford another decade of drift and decline. So I'm just going to share some slides. Whoops. So the literacy issue that we face is not only in Boston. Boston's numbers are just far worse than pretty much everyone else in the state. But there is widespread recognition that we're not teaching children how to read properly because only 50%

So we are seeing widespread recognition, and this is why. When we go to our scores, and these are the 2025 MCAS scores, What we see statewide is that only four in 10 students are reading at grade level. I'm gonna go to my close-up version of this.

Sorry, go ahead.

Sorry, that line's not advancing. So four in 10 students are reading on grade level across the Commonwealth. We know that the outcomes are far worse for children from historically marginalized backgrounds. And scores are down more than 20% from pre-pandemic levels, and we have not recovered. So why do we need literacy legislation which thankfully the State House has recognized and we've had a unanimous vote in the House and a unanimous vote in the Senate and they're currently in conference committee reconciling the differences between the two versions of the bill. But here's what we know about kids who can't read. They're four times less likely to graduate from high school. They have lower lifetime earnings. We will not be participating or adding them to our workforce pipeline, and they will not be participants in a vibrant economy. And I think what's most frightening to me as a mother and someone who works in education policy is the correlation between illiteracy and incarceration.

We know that it's over 70% of incarcerated men are illiterate and for Our students who are involved in juvenile justice system, 85% can't read. So this is Boston's data. I'm sharing third grade, fifth grade, and eighth grade. and I think you'll see that these numbers again are really nothing short of alarming. It seems that for some of our groups, the longer we have students, the worse the outcomes become. These outcomes, again, for our students with disabilities, and I want to be clear, when you see these single digit numbers, we all know, and I know many of us, Councilor Murphy, you're a former teacher, Councilor Mejia, you've been involved with education for many, many years. We know that there is a wide range of disability in our public schools. We have some children, like the children at the Carter School, who are profoundly disabled and need specialized attention.

But then you have children who have ADHD, slow processing speeds, maybe anxiety challenges. There's a whole range. There is no reason. Why, this number is not at 60%. There is no reason why students with disabilities should be in the single digits knowing what we pay. for that group and the English learners as well. 9% in the eighth grade. How is an English learner supposed to be able to access a biology or chemistry textbook if 91% of them are not reading on grade level? So Boston was extremely fortunate during the pandemic to get almost half a billion dollars in ARP ESSER funds that were intended to help schools recover from time out of school. What does that recovery look like? in Boston, or lack thereof. So in the entire third grade in the Boston public schools, we have eight black students who exceed expectations in reading, eight.

We have 28 Latino students. In the fourth grade, we have eight black students who exceed expectations in reading and 26 Latino students. In the fifth grade, we have eight black students who exceed expectations and 12 Latino students. and in the sixth grade, we have 24 black students who exceed expectations and 36 Latino students. So this is what we spend. As you can see, you've probably seen there's been a lot of articles in these last few years about what they're calling the Southern Surge, the Mississippi Miracle. Mississippi switched over to research and evidence-based instruction about 10, 12 years ago now. So this is what we spend on average, $35,000 in per pupil expenditures.

You can see that Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi spend significantly less than we do, and their poverty levels are more than double ours. Let's look at the reading scores according to NAEP, or also known as the Nation's Report Card. Mississippi students in the lead at 219, Louisiana 216, Boston 214, Alabama right behind us. 213. And then we go to the next slide. Let's look at low-income students. Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Boston. Just want to mention that we're spending almost three times what these states are spending. BPS budget. So where's our money going? We can see the increase in the general fund, 53% since FY19. We can see the staffing is down a bit this year.

11% and decrease in enrollment which you know when I see that in some of the materials that have been shared with the BPS community around the budget and I know we don't call it a soft landing anymore, but English High School, which has seen decreased enrollment, but their funding is not gonna Be decreased proportionately to the amount of students that they're losing, English high school reading and math levels are in the single digits for 10th graders. Single digits. So when we think about where we're investing money, What are we getting? What is that return on the investment if our students can't do math and they can't read? Okay, and then we wanna talk about this mass core completion that the globe has been covering. Again, I go back when you look at the eighth grade achievement levels for 2025 MCAS for both math and ELA.

I again ask, how with numbers this low, Are we expecting students to access high-level textbooks, whether it's biology, whether it's chemistry, whether it's European history or American history? How are we expecting them to succeed and to do Mass Corps, which is four years of English, four years of math, four years of, or sorry, three years of science, two years of a foreign language, one year of art, when you are starting Your high school year this far behind. And with that, I'll turn it over to Ross.

Thank you, Mary. Well, I'm Ross Wilson. I used to work in Boston Public Schools. I was a teacher at the Jackson Mann School, kindergarten teacher. I was a principal at the Haley Elementary School down in Roslindale. And then I used to work with David in central office. And I was in charge of human resources for a while. I was deputy superintendent and chief of staff for the Boston Public Schools. and I was in charge of collective bargaining with all of our unions for quite a while and now I am fortunate to be on a podcast called Last Night at School Committee where I cover every school committee meeting and give a briefing on school committee the day after school committee presents. It's a half hour little podcast and it summarizes what's going on. I also work at the Shaw Family Foundation where we support education, healthcare, and community in Boston. I'm proud to be here with Mary and with David.

I think David does a phenomenal job and I appreciate his dedication to BPS and actually all his patience in answering everyone's questions, both at school committee and at city council. and Mary for her incredible leadership in Boston, not only on the school committee, but in her role now. So thank you, Mary. I'm also the proud parent of three boys in Boston Public Schools, my oldest being a senior at Boston Latin School this year, Kind of crazy. I'll be brief on my comments about this current budget, but I want to raise just this point that this is not new. to be in the situation where we have a budget freeze in BPS. So in 2015, we had a budget freeze in BPS. I think we were about $15 million over budget, and in January we sent a memo out to the entire school system. We said, we're concerned about this. We're freezing budgets. We're freezing central budgets.

and we're gonna begin to free school-based budgets. And they manage down the budget month by month by month. I think, David, you were, were you there?

It was the year, that was the year before I started.

Okay, so that was the last year, I think, that we had a budget freeze. And then we also had a bigger budget freeze in 2009. We had a rather large budget deficit in 2009 coming right off of the financial crisis and we froze everyone's budgets and that year, by the way, we said to schools, We're going to freeze your budgets. If you don't use your money by X date, we're going to pull all the money back, and we did pull all the money back centrally. So this is not new to have a $53 million or more budget deficit at this time. I wanna talk about how to, the first part that's really important here is managing the budget down, right? So David has talked about, BPS has talked about four drivers for why we're in a budget deficit. Let me just talk about each one really quick because these the city council to me and the public and the school committee has to hold the school department responsible and accountable for managing these items down. Transportation, number one.

Last year, and Councilor Mejia referred to this, we rolled out a Zoom app in the city of Boston, and we said, this will fix everything. We're gonna roll out an app, we're gonna know who's on the bus, when they're on the bus, and we're going to decrease routes. We're gonna cut roots. Cutting roots would mean cutting drivers and it would mean saving money over a period of time. Instead, we have not done any of that. We have cut no roots at all off of this zoo map. And that was the promise last year. It was written about in the Boston Globe and so on. We've cut zero roots. Instead, we've added roots. So we have fewer, we have I think 10,000 fewer students in the last nine years and we've only added routes to our transportation and only added drivers to our transportation budget. We have no way of managing down transportation. Nothing.

Nothing that has been presented has shown me any confidence that we will manage this down. So next year, we proposed a budget 11 million over This year's transportation budget, $11 million over, and I guarantee we'll be here next year over transportation. And we are spending more on transportation than all of our academic programs combined. So Mary just presented those data. A third of our students reading at grade level. Single percentages are achieving students of color in our school system. And if we don't do something, we will be a district that just transports students. to underperforming schools. So something has to stop at this point. The next point around filling too many jobs. So we had a fill rate that was too successful. That's great in HR. When I was in HR, it was awesome to have a high fill rate.

It was excellent. But folks, we manage this. We should expect that this is not unexpected to fill jobs. When we budget a job, we should fill the job. If we budget for reading jobs, we should fill reading jobs. So this is not an explanation that I'm aware of or that I'm comfortable with. That is, we're out of control because our fill rate was too high. It doesn't make sense to me. The third thing around collective bargaining. I used to run collective bargaining. You agree to a contract. You agree to a contract you can afford. You don't agree to a contract that you can't afford and then say we need to freeze everyone's budgets Because we can't afford this contract. It doesn't work that way.

You sit at the table, you agree to a contract that you can afford, you present that to the city council, you present that to everybody else, and say, here's a contract we can afford. If you can't afford the contract, you don't agree to the contract. These are in our control. We can manage them down, but the way they're being presented by BPS at this point is as if they are outside of our control, but they are not. And I would implore the City Council, members of the public, and the school committee to hold the school department accountable for managing these down. The second thing I'll just say about equitable funding and weight and student funding. I was around when we rolled out weight and student funding. We did this because We were, nobody had transparency into how schools were funded. In fact, some school leaders would just call up central office and make a deal and say, hey, give me a little more money. It was not driven on student enrollment at all. So we'd have some schools with a lot more money than other schools. We had no idea why.

So we said, we have to change the incentive. We have to make sure there's transparency in school budgets. Let's fund every student. No matter where they go, they get funding. Let's incentivize schools to have full classrooms, to have full schools. That's why we did weighted student funding. The system over time stopped really following through and we had a lot of soft landings. We started padding schools. Now we have a new funding mechanism which I cannot find the formula for, for equitable funding. I've not seen a formula for equitable student funding. I can send you the link. Thank you. That funding formula, to me, is simply a new Soft landing. It is basically saying we have schools that are unsustainable, so we're not gonna incentivize enrollment any longer. We're just gonna give everyone a soft landing. And so years from now, we're gonna go through this budget crisis each year now, because our enrollment continues to decline. Nothing is gonna be changed for the next at least decade in terms of birth rate, if not longer. So we will be going through this every year.

We'll be looking at small schools every year. We'll be saying these schools are way too expensive to run, and we're gonna have to start closing schools. If we don't have a funding formula, that is transparent, that's accountable, and that incentivizes what we want, which are full schools with all of the things that our students should be able to have. Last thing I'll say, and then I'll turn it over for questions, is values. A budget should tell us what we value as a school system. Multilingual learners, a cut in multilingual learners for whatever reason. It says we're not valuing our multilingual learners. The majority of our district now are students with disabilities and multilingual learners. We should be funding those programs. Reading instruction. We should be funding reading instruction. If we see a cut in positions in reading, we're not valuing reading. We're valuing yellow bus transportation. We're not valuing reading. So our budget should tell us what we're valuing, and this budget is really hard for me to understand what we're valuing in BPS. Thank you.

Thank you, Ross. Thank you, Mary. I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues for questions, round two for David and round one for our guests. And before we go there, you know, Like Mary, I went to Boston public schools during the height of the busing era. This conversation, as it relates to education, is deeply personal to me. I've been an education advocate. David, you and I sat. at the Mattapan Community Library when we were talking about build BPS and I brought some parents there to listen and learn. So this is not hypothetical for me in my role. And yes, I am very aggressive when it comes to VPS issues and sometimes I know I scare y'all but the fact of the matter is is that I don't want to keep having the same conversation and expecting different results in my time in this role however I get to keep it in the seat

I want you to understand that we have to get to a place that we're delivering results for our families because they're the ones who are looking to us for answers. And so I just want you to know the line of questions that you have is for us to get this right. I just want to say that. We've been 10 years and I'm still here having the same conversation. And the only thing that changes are the characters who are in front of us. And we got to change the way we do business. So, Councilor Murphy.

So a few things that I heard. One thing I heard after I spoke first, and the good thing about going first is you get all your questions out there, but then hearing others, it sparks me to think, The reason for this filing was about the $53 million budget shortfall, the concerns we were hearing right away from school leaders, students themselves, parents, educators. And it was explained, and I think and a pretty clear way that these this is a shortfall for the current school year that we're in you know March now we have a few more months of this school year and that the freeze applies to not filling any vacant positions going forward, any discretionary purchases, stipends, field trips, all of these. You listed the exemptions. But I think what I heard or the narrative that's being told is let's just get through this year. That comes September, everything will continue and will be fully funded again.

And I don't believe that's true. That comes September, that we're not going to be able to put back all these positions, We're not going to continue to be able to spend the way we were on stipends for contracts and other things.

So yes, I think there is definitely a nuance there that you've hit on correctly, right? So our proposed budget for next year had some significant reductions in it. And just quickly to clarify one thing, The collective bargaining is a part of our cost for next year. It's not a source of the current year deficit. There are significant reductions that we're seeing across schools and Central for next year. Those overlap somewhat with things that are paused this year, but not entirely limited.

Because a couple of my colleagues said, oh, good. I'm glad I just heard you say, I can go back to my schools. I can go back to my community. I can go tell my wife who wants to pull my kids out of their school. That this is only for the rest of this year will be safe, and that's just not true.

Right. There are two things happening at the same time. The first is that the pause is only for this year. and the second is that there's a new budget for next year that for some schools is a reduction.

And that's what a lot of the conversation with my colleagues, they're hearing directly from schools in their district. Marion Ross, if you could just share like what's your biggest fear in this budget shortfall?

I mean, for me, one of the things that I find deeply concerning is Just how little we are talking about like our district is in a literacy and math crisis and the fact that this is not being discussed and it's not ever being tied to What are we doing to improve student outcomes? I feel that the bulk of the conversations that are happening at school committee meetings are operational. To Ross's point, we're talking about buses and the amount of money we're spending on buses and you know different school projects or oh we're teaching kids how to ride bikes at the Beethoven school well that's all well and good but they can't read and to me the fact that that's not being discussed at every meeting. And so when I think about the budget shortfall and what Councilor Culpepper raised about reading specialists, although to be clear, to your point, Reverend, that

If you're not using the right instructional materials and if your teachers aren't trained in evidence-based instruction, and too many of Boston teachers are not, and they don't have the materials they need, Our students are not going to learn how to read. So the fact, for example, that focus isn't even on the table is terrifying. because what is your future if you cannot read? And again, please look at those and you have my PowerPoint. Look at those 8th grade numbers. If you are in the single digits or the teens, you tell me where those kids are going to be in four years and what is their future if they can't read. Reading is your gateway. and we are, what is the purpose of schooling? The purpose of schooling is to learn how to read because reading then allows you to access everything else. So what are we do, to Ross's point,

Are we a school district that is focused on educating children or are we simply busing children from building to building for six and a half hours a day where they're not learning how to read and they're not learning how to do math? So are we a jobs and busing program or are we an educational establishment? Sadly, I don't think we are an educational establishment because our data is telling us otherwise.

I think my biggest concern is primarily for families and our students and trying to understand what the predictability is for our system. So for new families, do we understand what we should be getting out of our educational programming? Do we know what, should we even enter into this school system as new families? I think that's one of my primary concerns. I'm still, I have a lot of concerns around special education inclusionary programs and multilingual learner programs, quite frankly, around these inclusionary practices. I don't know what the models are. I haven't seen the models. I don't know how they're going to be exactly rolled out over time. What I've heard is there's inclusion planning teams. School-based teams will decide what their models are. and then we'll roll this out over a number of years. It really doesn't tell me what programming we're providing in every school, how we're doing that, how we're measuring effectiveness of those programs. And I just don't think we have the right investments in the right places.

Before the buzzer goes off, how many permanent teachers have been placed in or will be placed in the excess pool?

At this moment, no one is Thank you.

Thank you.

We only do those placements in August right before the year starts. Our goal is to have no more educators in that pool than we have in the current year.

How much do we have right now in the current year?

I'll have to double check the current number, but it's pretty low.

So even though schools are being asked to make cuts All of those cuts will be in non-permanent teachers because we know we have non-permanent teachers who have not received letters of reassurance.

We've been really clear with our schools and school years that our first priority needs to be hiring Those permanent educators to which we owe jobs. So when there are vacant positions, those vacant positions are going to start by going to candidates inside the system.

Of course, but that's what happens every year. So you're saying like the Henderson High School is closing, right? So those staff have to find jobs. They're permanent, but they're in the excess pool until another school picks them up.

That's actually not what happens every year at fear of making my colleague who implemented this to the right very upset. So every year we actually have a system of open hire.

Permanent teachers can transfer or get forced out. We will not be going back and forth. The time has already been allotted and extended graciously.

I guess at the end we just want to know how many

We can give you a third round, Councilor.

I'll wait for that.

That's right. You will wait for your next round.

We can call it what we want. I know we changed names to things.

We'll be back on Thursday. We'll be here. Excuse me. Hello. Sorry, Chair. I'm a W. Stop it. Flynn. And you only have five minutes, okay? I just want everybody to know for the record.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you to David, to Ross, and to Mary. And I want to say thank you to Mary for being a long time educator and committed to students with disabilities her entire life. So I think this is one of the most informative hearings I've been to on the city council. Especially on public education, Mary outlined really, in my opinion, a devastating status report on the BPS. There's no other way you could describe it any other way other than that. But my question, and David knows I like him, he's a wonderful guy. But David, you saw these numbers. How are students doing in Boston Public Schools? And where Boston students are today? Third grade, only eight black students exceed expectations.

Are those numbers accurate?

I would have to double-check the individual numbers.

So I've referenced that because listening to that presentation, if you were sitting here and you were on the DESE board, you were a member of DESE, you would vote for receivership based on the presentation that we just heard. whether you support it or against it, devastating, devastating numbers here. I just don't know how we can ignore it, how we can move forward without at least acknowledging that Black children and Latino children are not getting a decent education in the Boston public school system. I don't know how we skip over that. and act as if nothing is wrong and go on to other subjects. We should have every city councilor here talking about that particular issue. It's that devastating.

One city councilor actually said today that we shouldn't even be discussing BPS-related issues during the budget. Let me go to Ross. Ross, you've been working at the BPS system a long time. Meary said this is the This has been ongoing for 12 years, these results, these poor results. You were in the BPS system during this time. Did you know about these results? At that time you were a BPS employee. I'm not saying you were responsible for it, but I'm just asking did you know about it?

We were always concerned in BPS about not only our overall achievement of our students, but the achievement gaps that we saw in our school system. And we reported on these. Multiple times a year at school committee meetings, at city council hearings on the topic of student achievement.

So the results that Mary highlighted really should be what we're focused on going into the budget process, focused solely on these numbers. How does this budget impact Black and Brown students. We can't ignore that. And David, again, I respect you, but I don't know how we can move forward if we're not going to have a serious conversation about these numbers. So what in this budget will impact supporting black and brown students. Are we gonna come back next year and say, year set, based on the work we did on this budget, academic results for black and brown students are going to increase? Can we say that? That is certainly our goal. No, I know it's the goal. I support the goal.

But if it's been declining for 12 years, why is it going to improve this year?

I think, for me... The biggest single obstacle that BPS has had in the time I've been there has been churn. Has been what? Churn. Changes. Okay. Changes in leadership, changes in administration, changes in... Priorities and the way those priorities have been expressed in efforts to change student outcomes. One of the things I greatly appreciate about Superintendent Skipper and our current administration is Those priorities are now stable, right? And it takes a long time to make a change in a system as big as BPS that has had Results as troubling as the ones that were just outlined over a number of years. And so I think I have confidence that the strategies that we're aiming for are the right ones. But now it's about getting the results.

Well, let me ask one final question. Mary, you mentioned the city of Lawrence and other struggling cities, and I love that city, as we all do, but it's a struggling city. They have better academic results than Boston. But what are they doing that we're not doing? What can we learn from some of these cities that have the same type of The challenges that we have whether it's immigration whether it's social issues We support Lawrence. Lawrence supports us. But what are they doing that we're not doing?

Well, one of the things that Lawrence is doing, Councilor Flynn, is that they are offering mass court to all of their... High School Students, which is something Boston is not. And I think this is what the Globe story reported on is that, I can't understand why, but under the new collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union passed last spring, that some high school teachers are only teaching six courses a day whereas I was in a high school where we had seven courses a day and so the fact that Some teachers are only doing six courses a day and it doesn't allow for the amount of courses that a student would have to take in order to graduate having met these mass course standards. So I'm not sure why a contract would be approved that doesn't allow, frankly, for, again, if we are really focused on student achievement, Why are the needs of adults surpassing the needs of children? We are graduating children that will not even be able to go to Worcester State, UMass Boston, UMass Amherst, whatever it might be.

because they're not meeting mass course standards. That's a failure by adults. That's not a failure of children. And I will say, just to respond to Mr. Bloom, in terms of, yes, change can be slow. New York City a year ago adopted evidence-based instruction and retrained their teachers. Five to seven percentage point gain in reading scores in one year. Change is possible. It takes the political will to do it, and you have to acknowledge that what Boston is using is not HQIM. It is not evidence-based. and again, look at the data. No one is learning how to read in Boston.

Thank you, Mary. Madam Chair, am I out of time?

You've been out of time. I'm reclaiming that time because that's it. Yeah, you know, my daughter is now in the 10th grade, and since she started BPS, we've had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven superintendents. Okay, so that is a problem. I agree. That is that. And I think that every time we have a new superintendent, we change the, oh, this year's theme is going to be this. And we change everything all over again. And so I think that's a problem. We should stop doing that. Whatever. Wisset, you know, the previous administration. That's what keeps moving because otherwise we just keep spinning our wheels here. So anyways, I'm going to go next to, I believe, Councilor Weber.

because my colleagues have left, so it's Councilor Weber, Councilor Worrell, and then Councilor Culpepper, just so that everybody's on cue for their second round of questions, and you get five minutes, and I don't know why. I'm gonna give, you know, five minutes and it'll be a third round, just in case.

I want as much time as Councilor Flynn took just there.

You could watch the tape and you could see.

Five minutes is fine, Chair, I appreciate it. Okay, so just on that last point for MassCore, I guess I had a question for you, David. Number one is, do the freezes impact our ability to meet the needs of those seniors for graduation? What's your response? I know I've heard one third students not meeting graduation requirements, needing waivers. Do you agree with the number? How do we look at that?

I'm sorry. I don't have a great mass court answer ready. What I will say is the pause, the spending pause will not will not be an impact to that. Anything that would impact student achievement under MASCOR would be exempt from that. So it should not be having an impact on that.

OK. And then, you know, for Mary and for Ross, you know, I think Mary, as you know, like I, as a BPS parent of two kids, I've seen kind of the worst of BPS in terms of the Mission Hill School. Both my kids went there. and the best of BPS. I think my son graduated last year from Boston Arts Academy. My daughter's at BLA. I think in our jobs, we try to, at least last year, you're talking to advocates, looking at reading specialists. I totally agree, Mary, on your point, if they can't read, how are they gonna do anything in school? And so, you know, I and my colleagues advocated for more reading specialists, and we were told that there were going to be more. I think every school should have one. But in terms of our ability to kind of work on things, like what are, you know, What would you advocate for? So it might be high quality learning materials. That, from our standpoint,

There's internal decisions and I feel like our overall budget might have something else. If there's anything like practical things that we could pick off and really push for that you think would make the most

I think without question, you all approve this budget. If the budget does not include a switch to high quality instructional materials for early literacy, Nothing is going to change, Councilor Weber. I mean, that is the reality. You can add 100 reading specialists in every building if they don't have high quality materials. And if the teachers haven't been trained in using those materials, It won't make a damn bit of difference. And so they say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You saw the results. It's not going to change until you have legitimate HQIM Early Literacy in every building. And that's really what has to happen. You can say that it's HQIM, but it's not. You can look it up. There's something called Ed Reports. There is no focus listed. It is not peer reviewed. It is not HQIM. And so continuing to call it that does not make it true.

But we will not teach children how to read unless we are doing proper, which is following the five pillars of evidence-based instruction. Veteran BPS teacher just Friday night we were texting until about 10 30 at night about this and she told me she is spending thousands of dollars to supplement focus because There is widespread recognition. I encourage you to talk to teachers and school principals. They will tell you what they think of focus. It's not good. I had a longtime principal tell me, and I will quote him, when I said, what do you think of focus? He said, it's pure crap. There are good principals in this system who are using other materials because they can and they know better. That's the reality.

So is this a cost decision or this is like a philosophical?

It's not philosophical. I mean, there's 50 years of research that backs up science of reading.

Yeah, I mean, so why don't you think they're using it as because of the collective bargaining agreement or...

I think that people are comfortable doing what they do.

Okay, Ross, did you have anything to add to that? I believe the City Council should call for an independent audit of transportation.

Yeah, I guess to that point, David, what is our plan for reducing? Do we have a plan to reduce the cost of transportation and... When is that going to show results?

We have a plan to reduce the cost of transportation. What is it? We're going to be working on linking schools that have two sites so that one bus can service both campuses at the Roosevelt, for example, or something like that. We're working on identifying students who are bused at the greatest distance from home and helping them to find high quality choices closer to home. There's a variety of things that we're working on. What I would say is, and Ross would know this, right? Those things are marginal, right? The two things that cost the most money are having a school choice system and providing door-to-door services that are legally required on kids' IEPs. Those are the two things that cost money, the big bucks, that are in our control. The thing that isn't in our control is like charter transportation. There's some stuff we can do there that's marginal,

The two big things that cost the most money are the fact that we're a school choice district and not a neighborhood district, and the fact that we have to provide services to students with disabilities on their IEPs that say they need to work more.

I'm not asking another question, but I'm just, Well, the question is, am I translating this right? Your answer is, we can't lower the cost that much. We can make it dense, but because of the way transportation works in the city, and we

We can lower it to some degree.

Can you do me a favor? I like specific. Can you give me an estimated amount of what you can lower it to? Because then that way we can start working with real numbers here and then I'm going to move on to my other two colleagues who are patiently waiting, and then Councilor Weber will come back to you for another follow-up, if that's okay, if you don't mind. No problem, Chair.

Thank you. Councilor Mejia, can I do one quick follow-up to...

Yes, you can while you give me those numbers, Dave. You're not off the hook. Go ahead, Mary.

Thanks to Governor Healey, there is something called literacy launch where School districts can apply for funding, which is being granted in large amounts not only for evidence-based materials, but also to retrain our teachers and to support them in this work. There's been in the last five years, $74.4 million has been distributed. Boston has applied for six, they got 65,000. We have districts not even close to the size of Boston that have gotten like $3 million Thank you for that. And David?

So, I mean, our budget for next year for transportation is close to $200 million, as I think a counselor mentioned. I think in terms of what we could save, I don't have an exact number. There's some amount we could save by tinkering around the edges. But those two items, right? The fact we are a school choice district and we bus students to schools, right? And the fact that we have a large number of students who require door-to-door services on their IEPs are the significant Weber will come back for another more

that might feel like we're getting to where we need to be. Councilor Rao and then Councilor Culpepper, you each.

Thank you, Chair. Sticking on the transportation budget, I do agree. I think specifics could help, and I've always just, I've had access for like the last two or three years. But if we broke down that transportation budget to show out of district placement and the cost of that, IEP transportation, and then I think that would be very helpful. David.

Yeah, I hear you. We can certainly work on parts of that. It's a little bit hard in that students with IEPs are transported on the same bus as students without IEPs.

Well, even if you don't, like, out-of-district placements, like the big bucket ones that you can pull out, I think would be very helpful. And then this is a suggestion, a recommendation to the Chair. Because we are managing down costs and BPS, I would suggest that maybe we have quarterly meetings or on You know, the plan, round one and two, just to kind of just monitor.

We have that.

Okay, perfect, perfect. All right. Good to hear, good to hear. I'm excited about that. Just to make sure that we are meeting the projections, and if we are not meeting the projections then We can course correct if need be. So I think that will be extremely helpful not only to the body, but to the public, and then also just to make sure that BPS is on. in line. The other thing that I wanted to touch on was, are we to expect that the lowest Are we not renewing 400 teachers or paras in June? Is that the idea?

I would have to give you the exact number each type of position so the way it works is so the positions are being reduced and I can give you that exact total now and then what we do is we work through Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Two positions are vacant or somebody leaves or, you know, sort of other things going on.

So there's basically like a formula, union rules that kind of denotes like how we could do that. All right, do we have the demographics of who's in that pool? Yes. Okay, yeah, do the check if we could get that as well. And then this is the first full school year without ESSA funds, right? Is it a coincidence? that, you know, is that that fiscal cliff that we've been worrying about and now we're in a $53 million deficit?

It's definitely not fully a coincidence. No, there's definitely some relationship between those two things.

OK. And then year by year, like attrition, Teachers who retire, what is the average? Like how many?

Oh boy, I'll have to double check that number, but we hire hundreds of new teachers every year in a typical year.

Okay, yeah, if you could just find, I would love to know that, just to kind of know. You know, what that real number is when it comes to teachers in Paris. I think, let me just look at my notes one more time. Again, Mary, Ross, thank you for your very compelling data and your presentation. And I think we need to do everything that We can do as a council to make sure that our teachers, our students are using high quality material and evidence-based material as well, because to your point, I like to say cradle to career. We have to make sure that our students are on track from cradle to career. And if they can't read, if they can't do simple math, it's going to be hard for them out there in the real world. Definitely appreciate your advocacy. And I think that should be the same song or the same advocacy that we push here on the Boston City Council. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Worrell. And Councilor Culpepper, you get an extra 42 seconds.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Mary, good to see you. Just a couple of questions regarding your evidence base. Instruction Teachers. What do we do to get evidence-based instruction teachers?

Well, so part of the problem, I don't know if I should call you Councilor or Reverend.

Whatever. Just call me.

Part of the problem is that even our institutions of higher education here in Massachusetts are not The majority are not properly training our pre-service teachers in their education preparation programs. And so that's part of the challenge, Reverend, We have young, wonderful teachers that are graduating, going into our schools, and they very likely may have attended a university that didn't prepare them. but what the district can do and what 50% of our districts are already doing in Massachusetts is that they've made the switch to purchasing evidence-based instruction. There is a way to determine which are the instructional materials that research tells us these are the materials that have been most effective in teaching children how to read.

As we know, and it's part of the collective bargaining agreement, teachers get so many mandated hours of professional development every year, we make sure that that professional development is about also teaching them how to use these evidence-based instructional materials. And so, you know, this does come at a cost. We are fortunate to live in a state where there is actually a free HQIM available through Mass DESE. It's called Appleseeds. and so that is something that any district can actually adopt and use Appleseeds. It's K-2 and as part of the literacy bill work, they are building out a third grade component to this existing Appleseeds program But then again, through literacy launch, there's additional dollars. They just opened up the form. There's an online sign-up form. Any teacher who wants to be trained in evidence-based instruction can sign up for training that will take place this summer.

And so our state agency DESE has committed to training thousands of teachers in evidence-based instruction over the next few years. The governor has made that commitment as well. We need our city to make that commitment, Reverend.

And would that be part of, in your opinion, teacher certification?

So it's, no, I don't, I mean, Ross, you could probably answer that better. It's not necessarily part of teacher certification. No, could you make that a part of it? Yes, and actually, some of the organizations we've been working with, Reverend, on the literacy bill, actually that is a component that they are talking about, is how do we ensure that all of our teachers And this is something, frankly, that we need our institutions of higher ed to commit to also only teaching our future teachers in evidence-based instruction, whether it's math, whether it's ELA or reading, that is something that we need to tackle.

And it's a tough question, but would, and you mentioned this, so I'm picking up on, I'm not starting this, But would you recommend that we not approve this budget unless there is some way that they can show that they're moving toward evidence-based instructors?

Yes. Yes, I would say that because, again, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I showed you how bad our data is. I mean, frankly, do we want it to get worse? I mean, what are we doing?

And so are you recommending that we not approve this budget?

Unless there's some kind of evidence base? Yes, correct. Because the one, and I said this in my remarks, the one thing that never gets discussed, whether it's The school committee, they never talk about what did we spend money on last year that didn't work, what are we doing differently with that money. Every year, regardless of whatever literacy curricula you're using, Every year you have to purchase licenses, copyrights for the materials you're using. We have that money. It's not like Boston doesn't have money for curriculum. They purchase it all the time. So the reality is, Use the money better and wisely because we are not now.

And that takes me to Ross. Ross, you said we don't have the right investment in the right places. What, in your opinion, are the right investment in the right places?

We should absolutely be investing in inclusionary practices for students with disabilities. We should be investing in...

Slow, slow, slow up, slow up.

I was concerned about your timing then, Councilor Mejia.

No, no, no, she gave me 42 of it. Got it. Inclusionary stuff, inclusionary stuff.

Inclusionary practices for students with disabilities. I also think we should be investing more in bilingual education for our multilingual learners. Those are two really core critical programs that I think We've begun to roll out, as Mr. Bloom has said, and we're beginning to expand, but we're not expanding them fast enough and robust enough in our system.

And David, I just have one question for you. David, what happens if we decide to disapprove the School Committee Budget. What's the procedure from there?

So procedurally, if the council does not approve a budget for the Boston Public Schools, we get something called a 112th budget. Each month until the council eventually approves the budget, we get an appropriation equal to 1 12th of our prior year appropriation. For the first roughly two months of the year, we can manage this pretty well because of the summer, because July and August, we don't need one twelfth of our total budget to be able to manage the work. Starting in September, this starts to become a more significant challenge as we have to pay for the cost of collective bargaining, as Ross mentioned earlier, and other things. with that funding. So mechanically, though, we effectively get a 1-12 appropriation each month. Until we approve the entire budget. Until the council ultimately approves the budget.

Okay.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you. All right, so it's my turn. And I will just note for the record that I always encourage my colleagues to utilize their power. And the limited power that we really have is the budget. And so I always say let's be organized, let's be strategic, and let's really utilize the BPS budget as an opportunity for us to say no and hold ourselves accountable To that but I just don't think we've ever had the political will and I've been here seven years and every every year I always say no to the BPS budget because I never believe it's meeting the moment and I always encourage the chair to You know, at least don't vote yes the first time because it's just the past. It's just a blank check. To be honest with you, it is an abusive relationship.

We expect, I mean, I'm being dramatic here, but we expect that there's gonna be some, you say you're gonna do something differently, then we write the check, y'all get the money, and then y'all act like y'all don't even know us, and then y'all don't come back here until, What a few months later when it's time to hold you all accountable for the budget season. And then that's it. This relationship is just not working. And I think that that's why you've gotten away with half the things you've gotten away with, because we have not had the political will on this council to really be the checks and balances to the administration. And I feel like that is dangerous. And when we talk about the school to prison pipeline, we should also be held accountable. That's malpractice on our end because we are knowingly, knowingly allowing this to continue and, you know, something has to give. And so I did not put my time on.

I went on a whole tangent here, so sorry about that. But I'm the chair. I could do that. So let's talk a little bit about, I'm curious, I want to talk a little bit about the transportation. Because you said you didn't have that information in front of you. Is that the transportation cost? Like how many are English, I mean how many are, Special Education, how many are door-to-door? So the fact that you don't have that information or you just don't know it, which is it?

So there are certain parts of the information I have and other parts I don't have today.

but you do have it somewhere?

We can certainly get it to you, yes.

But is it a practice for BPS to have accurate information

Yes, it is a practice for BPS to have accurate information. If there's a particular view of that information that is maybe different than the way we prepare it, we'll prepare it in that different way.

Okay, so I'd like that. I just want to note that for the record. And then our office is going to be doing a mid-year review and an end-of-the-year review on your budget just so that we can get ahead of this conversation and where we want to have it. and looking at the outcomes and the impact on student results. And so Mary will be using your data juxtaposed to how much money we've spent and where we're at. because I feel like that's what real accountability needs to start looking like. And I feel like we've gotten too comfortable in this administration. And I think that now is an opportunity for us to really Step into our power and really work in partnership with the district. So just want to put you on notice. I'll be here. It's coming down the pipeline. So let's talk a little bit about...

The question regarding the para, the paras that are being, those are usually the lowest wage workers, right? And they're the ones who are usually native language speakers, they're the ones who can identify oftentimes the most with the students that are in the classroom. So I'm just curious, how did we end up with them being the reason, the cuts? Why that cohort of folks?

Well, I mean, they're definitely not, I don't think we're saying they're disproportionately being targeted for reductions.

Well, in these streets, that's how it feels like, so I just want you to know that. You may not think so, but that's what people are saying.

Yes, and I hear you on that, and I think part of it is we do have fewer students, right? So we are going to need fewer teachers, fewer paraprofessionals. And fewer people in central staff.

And fewer people in central staff. Right. So then let's look at equity. Because the people who are on the top and are making the most, those folks can easily just find work elsewhere. And then the people who are at the bottom They already have either interrupted education, they're already having a hard time even finding job placement. This program was created so that we can, at least with the parents, so we can create a pipeline for native language speakers and more people of low income to enter the workforce. There was a very intentional effort made around paras and closing the equity gap, if you will. So if that is true, David, help me understand why the target on classroom instruction staff and not more on central staff. You still haven't given me the number of how many people

How many dollars in the amount of essential staff?

Yeah, I apologize. I have the number I have mixes the dollars with the... The raises that like union staff and others are getting so I'm separating out the dollars from the reductions in particular as well need to separate out for you for both schools and central office. So there are... Where's my number? Here it is. So we're anticipating about... 426 position reductions in schools about half of whom are coming from of half of which are coming from the schools that are closing and then approximately 150 positions at central office on central office budgets. The thing I will just say is central office, like laying me off, right, is 7% of our overall budget.

The vast majority of central office expenditures are on things that you experience in schools. Custodians, related service providers, one-to-one paras.

Yeah, but I asked for a dollar amount. Can you give me the dollar amount? In central staff, are there people who are making over $100,000 a year? Are there people who are making $50,000? I mean, I need a dollar amount. Out of that 150, can you give me the dollar amount that we're saving? for cuts in central staff, and the dollar amount for cuts that we're saving for school site staff.

So the school site staff one, the problem I have is I have to separate out The raises the staff are getting from the reduction. So I can give you a number that's not right, but I'm not going to do that. For central staff, my best I best remember that.

What happened to your team? I asked this question like three hours ago.

Why didn't you correct us? I know, I know, I know. I'll go back. I'll go back. I told them.

What in the world?

They got to answer everything for me, right? They know how I am. It's about $13 million.

$13 million for central staff.

But for centrally budgeted staff.

But $13 million, and then we don't have a number for the paras.

So it's for central staff, it's...

Give me an estimate.

It's about 150 positions versus 420 in schools. I can come back. When I see you again on Thursday, I'll give you a number. I promise.

What am I coming back for? There's another hearing.

We're here. It's his fault.

We're here on Thursday. Okay, I was like, I'm not here on Thursday.

I'll get it to you by Thursday either way.

Well, if I'm here. If not, you'll still get it to me. You'll send me an email. Yeah. I'll work with Anna. We'll get it to you. All right. So I guess my time was up, so I want to be mindful of that. So I'm going to give my council colleagues One last question each, and then maybe you want to do some closing remarks while you're out there.

Sure. I'll do it all at once. Thank you. So some just clarifying questions that you may just need to get back to us on. If we're projecting 426 positions cut and you're saying half of them will be from School closures approximately right but there's an assumption there may be people listening in that that means oh well it doesn't matter the school's closing anyway that means 213 teachers at schools that will be closing have already been placed for September at other schools? Or are they right now in a position where they don't know where they're going to be for September? I know we have to continue to pay their contracts. We're going through the process of placing them. Right. And that's my question. We can call it what we want. And we know permanent teachers can't just be fired. We have to find a position for them in the system somewhere.

How many teachers right now, today, do we not know where their position will be for September?

I don't have that number with me today, but I can get it for you.

Okay, but that would be good. And of the other 213 positions, that aren't coming from schools that are being closed. That means of 119 schools, that's on average like two positions per school are being cut. Right, so where are those? teach is going and do we have a list of each of those what those positions are yes all right can I get a list of yep yeah Also, just so everyone's clear and I get that, you know, centrally budgeted positions are different from central staff, can you also get us a list of exactly what is considered a centrally budgeted So everyone is clear about the one-to-one paras, the custodians, all that. So it's very clear to not just the public but our colleagues when we go into budget season. And of that number, you said 13 million. Most of that 13 million is centrally budgeted positions, not central staff, correct? Correct. Correct.

So that means there are no positions like in The superintendents are not maybe no, but very few position. So I just want to be clear to people that when we say we've cut money from the central budget, it doesn't mean we're cutting. It means we might have been cutting custodians or Bus Monitor 121 Paris. So I just want a clear list of exactly what BPS calls a centrally budgeted position. Our provisional teachers that are hired this year with the contract that will expire. Obviously every provisional teacher's contract expires at the end of the school year. How many of our provisional teachers did not receive an RA, a letter of reasonable assurance?

I'll pull that for you.

And could you also let me know how many provisional teachers we have in the system so I can just compare that? And one last statement as I close it out here. You did say, and so I just would love a clarification, that you believe that there is a correlation between This year's budget shortfall and ESSER funding ending.

I do.

And could you explain exactly where you see that correlation?

I think... During ESSER, both for reasons inside the district and conditional for the job market and education more broadly as every district or many districts had ESSER funding, we got used to a certain degree of vacancy or savings. And I think the degree to which our positions filled this year was more than we expected. We grew by a number of positions when we had ESSER dollars, but our fill rate also declined, right? In part because we had a lot of retirements during the pandemic, in part because we had more positions and we didn't have people to fill them all.

As we reduced the number of positions coming off of ASSER, we anticipated a change in our fill rate, but the actual result was more than we expected.

Do we have the exact number of positions that were I'm used for ESSER funding, even though all leaders were told don't use it for staffing, knowing that this is cliff spending.

Yes, I think when you have that much money to spend, you're going to have to hire some staff.

I know I'm out of time, and we're going to Council Weber, but thank you.

Now y'all are getting written up tomorrow. Don't get too excited, Councilor Weber. You're not next. I have to say something real quick before you go. But I want to add to the list, Councilor Murphy. I like that broken down by the dollar amount that the individual makes. and the dollar amount. I want to know exactly how much that salary is. I think that that's really important from an equity standpoint. Our lowest wage workers are usually the first to go. and I want to make sure that we're taking care of our custodians and other folks. And I want to see those cuts up there, all the way up there. So if they're not there, then we can make some recommendations. OK, Councilor Weber.

I'll be brief but I mean I feel like I mean these kinds of discussions about BPS just remind me if there's this old joke where someone's grandmother goes to a restaurant they say how was was it and she says The food was terrible and the portions were so small. And it's like we spend more and the scores are terrible. And it's like we're... It seems like we're spending too much and then we're not getting the results. So there's like, we're trying to reduce costs. People talk about, I think it's 1.7 billion for next year. with external funding, like we're over 1.8, right? I guess so I mean for David like in terms of when we hear numbers like you know Mary went over and then the amount we spend is so much like I just my question is

Are we really so bad at this that we can't deliver for our kids? Or, you know, is there some, like, are we comparing apples to apples when we talk about Lowell or Lawrence or Mississippi? We hear how the majority of kids in our system are either English language learners or have special needs or or both, like is there something, like how do we explain at a base level to a, you know, To a fifth grader, like why we keep seeing these numbers or why we're seeing these numbers now where We're up to $36,000 a student in next year's budget.

I think there are two things that can both be true that make this really hard. Number one is I think we can all agree that these results are unacceptable. And that no one who works at BPS should be setting out to achieve the results we're achieving right now. I don't think there are very many people who I work with who would disagree with me on that. I think what can also be true is that there is a degree of There's nuance to every story that's important to discuss when we talk about this, right? And so when we talk about how much money we spend, right, compared to other parts of the country or other places. We also pay a lot more than those places, and we believe in that as a thing we should do.

We have a high cost of living in Boston. It's part of why it costs a bunch of money. We've invested all this money in transportation for, as my colleagues sitting with me know better than me, right, have to do with a longstanding legacy of desegregation in Boston. that we're still grappling with, right? And so I think there can both be truth to these results, right? Which they're not Mary's numbers. She took them from the DESE website. They're just the numbers, right? These results are not acceptable. We need to be better. And there is this complexity to the amount we spend. As we talk about and pull apart these individual numbers, why are we reducing this? Why are we reducing that? Why are we reducing this? Why are we spending money on that? There's all of this nuance in the detail, and all of a sudden you're at $1.7 billion.

And the challenge I have, it's my responsibility, is to figure out how to parse out $1.7 billion into a conversation that we can have that gets at the goal of improving student outcomes.

It's a difficult conversation every time. So thanks, Chair.

Thank you, Councilor Weber. And before I go, I'm just going to do public testimony. You've been incredibly patient. Sorry that we waited. I didn't realize that you were here for public testimony until you...

I didn't realize either.

Yeah. Oh, okay, great. So you just got inspired, so awesome. So Queenie Lynn Walters, you have two minutes.

Okay, thanks so much to the city council. My name is Quinny Lynn Walters. I'm a barred attorney in the state of Massachusetts. and a mother of a toddler who I hope one day will become a Boston Public School graduate just like myself. I'm also an ESL learner. I immigrated to the US about 31 years ago this month. I went to King Open and then eventually I ended up at Boston Latin after a stint in Randolph Public Schools. and I came in here to the second this floor because I was looking for the Dunkin Donuts and this is not a joke because I really was you know I came to get some copies of the baby's birth certificates And then I said, oh, I'll just say hi to my friends that are on the city council, give them my holiday card. And then one of them said, one of them happened to be in here. and I thought, okay, this is relevant to me.

So I guess my testimony is around regarding, I'm a little bit shocked Thank you. Thank you. Prom over special education. How would that be an exemption? Or if I misunderstood that, how did we get into a $50 million budget shortfall How did that just happen? We have AI tools right now. I'm a tech founder. That's not my training, but that's how I got into it because I just had a baby and I had a massive hemorrhage at MGH and I had postpartum depression. which is how my baby ended up in early intervention. So I'm also an early intervention parent advocate. And I want to say that with the well-meaning members of the council, with the questions, some of you all are too much in the weeds and not enough in

Let's look at the arc of the universe, right? We're talking about equality and justice here, and then you guys are gabbling over line item budgets involving cuts to as and Councilwoman Mejia alluded to, these are paraprofessionals whose jobs would be cut. So I would just say, let's think about the health equity element of who is in special education in the first place? There are parents and children who don't have the resources that suffer from structural racism and they will continue to add to future budget shortfalls if we don't address maternal health and nutrition and support and those are intersectional issues. So instead of nitpicking, I would advise everybody to just take a look at yourself because we went through this in 2003. I had to start an art program for my sister's school, Farragut Elementary School, because there was no art budget. And I just liked art, and that's what got me into Harvard. I wasn't doing it for credit, I just thought,

Teach some art to some students and that was 23 years ago so I agree with everybody who is frustrated because I'm very angry and I'm over my time so thank you very much and I respect everybody's hard work.

Thank you. Thank you for coming here and being inspired to speak. I feel like we learn more when we get to hear from those that we serve. So thank you for doing just that. And so I will go next. I'm not gonna hold y'all hostage, because I know it's five o'clock. Is it five o'clock? I had two minutes, okay. So I'll just say this, like, when I was in school, I had home ec, art, I had everything, even though I was a low income, you know, I went to, I lived in a very, you know, Thank you for joining us. making $36,000 per student.

Make that make sense when we're looking at the return on those investments. And I think... We are at a very critical juncture in our time here on the council, especially if we're going to be the best district in the country. We're going to have to start making some really difficult decisions, and those decisions are going to have to be based on what is right for students and not what is advantageous for political safety. And I think that that's hard. David and I feel... Thank you so much. Thank you. And I have no problem doing that because I've done it in the past, even when I wasn't the chair. But now that I have this responsibility, I can't look away.

and just keep thinking that approving a budget that does not really reflect the moment is the right thing to do. So we haven't even, we just started the process and we're already starting off at no. Like, I'm there. A lot is going to have to change to get me to say yes to the BPS budget, regardless of what people think. And I will Not ask any more questions. I got a lot of my colleagues who got questions that we'll make sure that we follow up on. And like Queenie, you know, I'm an English language learner. My mom did not speak English. I had to be the official translator. I barely graduated high school. Thank God MCAS was not around when I was in high school because I probably would still be in high school right now if that was the case. And so this is all very... Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. With things that I sometimes don't even understand half the things that you're saying. And I know the people that follow me don't understand half the things that you're saying either. Like we have to stop doing that. We have to come here. We have to be real. We have to be honest. We have to be accountable and we have to be ready to say, here's the truth of the matter. Here's what we need to get out of this hole. And it shouldn't be another $36,000 per student. to get the type of outcomes that Mary shared with us. That just is not going to work, at least not for me. So with that, this hearing on docket 0200 is adjourned.

Thank you.