Dr. David Hopson
Over the past two weeks, I’ve experienced a wide range of issues and viewpoints regarding education in the Commonwealth. In each of the activities I’ve taken part in, the core belief was that public education is critical to the success of students, our towns, the state, and the country in terms of the economy, citizen participation in governance, and even our daily lives. However, the way forward to reaching the goal of a well-educated citizenry looked quite different, depending on the mission of each of the groups I worked with.
Locally, we’re now on Version 5.0 of this year’s budget and special town meetings in Chester, Russell, and Worthington are being scheduled to vote this budget. Overall, the school committee did not change student services in this version; rather the district was able to reflect actual expenditures through the first third of the current fiscal year. For example, with hiring now completed, we’ve been able to adjust the actual cost of staffing the schools, including insurance costs, with more accuracy now than when we developed the budget nearly a year ago. Thus, the overall budget request now stands at $153,930 (or 0.93%) over last year’s budget and total assessments are up by only $65,013 (or 0.68%) over FY’13—much less than the cost of inflation. We have had positive feedback from some town officials regarding this budget and hope that we can get at least one of the remaining towns to approve the budget and avoid having the state set our budget in December.
I also attended a Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS) meeting recently where budgets and unfunded liabilities were hot topics of discussion. Apparently, the change from the Governor’s budget to the final adopted state budget regarding state aid for education impacted the majority of school districts in the state and was particularly difficult for regional school districts, whose budgets need to be set far before the June 30 date required by many city schools. Those changes in assessments, although not caused by the regional school districts, created much anguish in towns belonging to regional school districts. This, coupled with the continuing debate surrounding unfunded mandates from the state and federal government, has played havoc with school budgets throughout the state, despite everyone’s efforts to increase state funding for education. MARS has some potential legislation moving forward to help alleviate these problems but, as with all legislation, the final outcome is unknown at this time.
Massachusetts’ public universities are undertaking a “Higher Education Vision Project” that wants to make public higher education in Massachusetts the best in the nation. As an individual who has worked with Westfield State University over the years, I was honored to participate as a member of WSU’s group at this event. Similar to the drive to close achievement gaps, raise student performance, and increase student opportunities in public K-12 schools, the Vision Project looks to do the same in higher education. Part of this planning involves collaborating with K-12 education to help prepare students for higher education and much work is being done in this area, although primarily in more populated areas that have many more educational issues related to student performance than we do. Some good ideas emerged and pilot projects funded through private grants may lead to similar joint efforts across the entire state; however, many of these require significant additional funding to implement and sustain. While there are many great ideas that show much promise of increasing student readiness for, and success during, higher education, a consistent—and increasing—need for funding is slowing the implementation of said ideas and programs.
The last area I’ll hit upon is the idea of using E-Rate funding to increase the availability and use of technology to move K-12 education forward. E-Rate funding comes from a portion of phone bills that is then used to help schools implement technology. This fund is changing rapidly and has become much more focused on increasing student access to high speed internet. One of the problems with E-Rate is that the amount of funding available is much less than what is requested and needed to fulfill the ever-increasing requirements on bandwidth for items such as online testing and evaluation. While the final changes are being determined, it seems evident that the push to provide high-speed Internet throughout the state, including rural areas such as Gateway, is essential not only for education, but also for business, local governments and the overall economy.
