Rising SPED costs at the heart of school budget crisis

While the recent pledge by Governor Deval Patrick to maintain local aid at current levels in 2011 was welcome news to be sure, school officials in Canton still have a million reasons to be worried about their FY2011 operating budget, beginning — and seemingly ending — with a million-dollar shortfall tied to out-of-district special education placements.

In their meeting last Thursday, School Committee members went over the topic at length yet again, and they continued to warn the community that without real reform or extraordinary assistance, the problem will only get worse until it eventually becomes unmanageable. 

“All these years of trying to fit it all together … eventually you’re going to have a breaking point,” said committee member Tim Brooks, who filled in as chair for the absent Reuki Schutt.

As for whether that breaking point has been reached, Superintendent Dr. John D’Auria said it was still too soon to tell, although he acknowledged that the district’s skyrocketing special education costs have created a real dilemma over the past few years.

 “Dilemmas don’t have solutions,” noted D’Auria. “They have to be managed.”

However, he said the problem with managing this particular dilemma, at least in the short term, is that there are still several “assumptions” attached to next year’s projected shortfall, including the number of students requiring out-of-district services — a number that could change without warning.

School officials are also depending on the Board of Assessors to capture at least some additional revenues from its ongoing revaluation of properties, which is expected to be complete by early to mid February, and they are hoping to once again receive a sizable grant from the federal stimulus program.

Another “wild card” is the state’s circuit breaker program, which partially reimburses school districts for high-cost special education students, although at a rate far lower than in the past. D’Auria said Canton plans to apply for additional funds under the program’s “extraordinary relief” provision, which only two years ago netted the schools an extra $250,000.

Of course, none of these funding sources are guaranteed, including the “level funded” state aid recommended by the governor last week. If that falls through, the schools’ overall shortfall could climb to $1.3 million and necessitate painful cuts in a number of areas.

But the biggest component of any deficit next year will be in special education, where costs have been soaring since 2003. In fact, special education now accounts for 25 percent of all school spending, and committee member Robert Barker said it has even replaced health care costs as the school system’s biggest “budget buster.”

Barker said he hopes that the federal government will eventually foot the bill for these legally mandated services, but until then he suggested that the town make special education a fixed expense outside of the operating budget so as to avoid jeopardizing regular education even further.

“Clearly there needs to be alternative ways of dealing with this,” said Barker, who is also in favor of covering extraordinary special education expenses through an annual town meeting appropriation.

Committee member Liz Salisbury said she could even envision a day when there will be a mass exodus of regular education students to the private schools, leaving the public schools to serve mostly special education and lower income students and thereby creating even “more of a distinction between the haves and have nots.”

“It’s not that farfetched,” she insisted.

At the same time, Salisbury said Canton deserves plenty of credit for being proactive in its efforts to maximize funds, and she pointed to the school system’s emphasis on energy conservation as one example.

D’Auria added that the schools have also saved many thousands with its highly successful in-house programs for students with severe disabilities — programs that have enabled approximately 15 more students to be educated in their own community, according to Business Manager Ken Leon’s estimates.

Committee member Cindy Thomas also suggested that they could help many more children — and save the district money in the long-term — if they added more early intervention programs at the elementary levels. D’Auria agreed, noting that the “earlier we [intervene with] children, the much better chance they have of making it in the regular domain.”

And while the size of the deficit will likely prohibit him from recommending a lot of new programming, D’Auria did hint that his recommendations would include some type of early intervention in the elementary schools.

He did not get into specifics, nor did he make any promises — not with a deficit that could climb well over $1 million. Yet he stressed that there are still “places where we can continue to grow so we can build on our strengths.”

At the very least, he said it is important for school systems to “keep an eye on a target, even if we can’t reach it.”

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Posted by Jay Turner on Jan 28 2010. Filed under News, Schools. Both comments and pings are currently closed.