Linda Hanson, a K-8 reading coach for the Arlington public schools and an Arlington Education Association 2nd vice president, presented the following remarks on March 1, 2012, during the hearing on the proposed fiscal 2013 budget. Numbers reported below were amended March 10, 2012, and you can see them here >>
Last June, the Arlington community gave us all the gift of the override, which will, with the help of the GIC health insurance savings, provide the schools and Town with five years of stable funding. It’s an incredible gift, and I want everyone to know how much teachers appreciate this financial commitment. The override allowed many teachers to keep their jobs.
It also afforded the whole school system the ability to continue to provide Arlington students with a great educational experience.
We now have the luxury of being able to carry out some long term planning, setting goals and priorities for the limited, but stable revenue available.
One of the principal commitments of the override plan was that Town and School budgets would be held to a3.5o/o annual increase, with the exception of the Special Education and health insurance line items, which would be held to 7 percent.
The idea was that we would take the FY11 budget and create level service budgets going forward using FY11 as a base, with the 3.5 and 7% increases added on each year. In addition, the schools were allowed to add $600,000 to its base budget, to bring back some of the many critical positions that had to be cut in order to balance the FY11 budget.
The main point I want to address tonight is the concern I have for the need to examine and articulate goals and priorities for the next four years, not just for the coming year, because decisions made for the FY13 budget will affect funds available for priorities in FY14 – FY16.
We need to understand the full impact of how adding the proposed new positions to the FY11 base affects the funds available for other cost areas, including cost of living raises for the existing employees, as well as other cost area increases over time, and any future program priorities. The override budget for the schools used the FY11 budget, plus the addition of $600,000 as a base for calculating future budget increases. Since that time, the schools have added and are proposing to add a significant number of new positions:
o $224,000 in new positions was added when the Finance Committee transferred money to the schools in the spring of 2011 before the override vote took place. These positions were the first positions to be added to the FY11 level-service budget.
o Another $500,000 in positions was added with the $600,000 extra from the additional monies given to the schools as part of the override revenue. [The other $100,000 was used to offset Athletic fees]. In the FY13 budget, another $853,269 in new or increased positions is being proposed.
That’s a total of around 22 new positions from the FY11 budget. (This figures nets out the reduction in TA positions that is being proposed.)
As a comparison, in the same amount of time, the Town has added only new positions to 5 its FYI-L level service budget, according to the Town Manager’s FY13 Financial Plan.
While many of the proposed new positions are clearly critical to maintaining an effective school system, the result of carrying forward this number of additional positions in fixed a revenue system quickly bumps up against the district’s ability to afford basic cost-of-living increases for the current employees, let alone to begin to close the gap between current teacher pay in Arlington, and the prevailing wage in other similar districts.
Simply carrying forward this large number of new positions over the next four years significantly constrains the revenue available for any other priority. Future increases in staffing in subsequent years will erode that capability even further.
Research that Dr. Allison Ampe, Annie LaCourt and I undertook year a ago showed that Arlington pays its teachers anywhere from 2.5 percent to 9.6 percent less than the average of the 20 towns the former Town manager used as a basket of communities to compare Arlington to each year in his budget presentation.
We actually carried out this analysis with three different groups of communities, and the picture was remarkably consistent: Arlington pays its teachers less than the average of other comparable communities.
Current research points to the central role of the skills of the teacher in front of the students. Arlington needs to figure out how to attract and retain top talent in our teaching ranks.
The FY13 budget is heavy on administrative positions, with good reason. Many administrative positions were cut to save classroom positions during the severely constrained budgets of the past few years.
As I speak, we are actively looking to fill two principal positions, a math department leader, a database administrator and two district-level leadership positions — assistant superintendent and director of special education. These positions are important to the overall functioning of the district, and we will need good administrators to implement the new teacher-evaluation regulations, among other initiatives.
I don’t think we will attract the best talent to these positions at a compensation level that is 3 percent to 9 percent below the prevailing rate for similar positions in similar towns. And if we aren’t going to ask our administrators to take this kind of discounted salary, we need to ask ourselves what message this sends when we ask our teachers to accept it.
With the override in place, and GIC savings coming in significantly above expectations, this is the time for the SC and the District to weigh in on whether or not bringing teacher pay closer to the average of other similar districts is or is not a priority.
The confluence of events with the override and the GIC savings makes this a *golden opportunity* to do some longer-range planning, planning that would include modeling the economic impact of adding the proposed positions this year, and in the next four years, while staying within the override budget.
I am not saying don’t add any new positions. I am just requesting that, before you take a vote on this budget, you look at the total impact on the bottom line of the addition of the positions that have already been added, and of those that are in the current FY13 proposal, within the constraints of the override budget. Please make sure that you understand both the short and long-term effects of your decision.
Every position should be carefully scrutinized and justified. It may feel like we are flush with money after the drought of the past few years, but the reality is that there are other areas of the budget that need serious consideration.
There are trade-offs for this budget, and for future budgets. As Selectman Annie LaCourt likes to say, “Budgets are a reflection of our values.” Please take a multiyear look at your vision for where you are taking this school district, and what the sum of your priorities are, weighing out the total impact.
Teachers have recently been asked to make significant sacrifices in terms of health insurance coverage at the local level, and future pension benefits at the state level.
Now is the time to establish goal or a benchmark around closing the salary gap between Arlington and the prevailing wages in other, similar towns.
I would like to respectfully suggest the following:
1) That the CFO and superintendent model the effect of these proposed staffing increases to the level-service budget on available funds for the next four years the current duration of the override funding.
2) That the school department consider creating a “personnel trend” chart similar to the town’s “Personnel Trends” bar graph, showing total position changes with each successive year by department or however you think it would be best to capture the changes.
3) That the School Committee considers formally addressing the issue of comparable wages, and come up with some language to capture the extent to which you consider this value or a priority. Along these same lines, I hope that as a committee you will undertake to review and inform yourselves of the data that shows how Arlington stacks up against other similar communities.
We need to have a longer-term vision to understand the trade-offs between staffing levels and compensation levels, to ensure that we abide by the commitments of the override economics, and to fulfill the promise to employees about taking a closer look at comparable wages now that we have made the transition to the GIC.
Let’s use this opportunity of a new beginning to create budget at that takes into consideration all of the pieces of the budget pie in a multiyear plan.
