Westport Schools – Enrollment Down, Spending Up

                                                                                                       

Two thirds of the Westport town budget is for education. This includes not only dollars spent by the School Committee but dollars spent by Town Hall to support education, and tuition to regional schools. We all share a desire for good education for the next generation. But we need to take a careful look at how this chunk of money is being spent because it accounts for such an overwhelming part of the Town budget. We can not continue treating school spending as a Sacred Cow. The graph below plots dollars spent by Town Hall, dollars spent by School Committee, and enrollment over the past eight years for Westport schools. The data are normalized to their 2006 values.

 

 

 

The dollars contributed by Town Hall have risen 6% per year, the dollars spent by the School Committee have risen 2.7% per year, and the enrollment has declined 2% per year. We see that the cost of Westport public schools is marching upward even in the face of declining enrollment. It is crowding out funding for other town services.

 

Professor C. Northcote Parkenson, noted scholar in the field of public administration, prolific author, and respected navel historian, studied the downsizing of the British Navy from 1914 to 1928. He found that the number of ships fell from 62 to 20 while the number of officials and clerks rose from 3249 to 4558.  That is the number of ships fell to 32% of the starting number while the number of officials rose to 140% of the starting number. Parkenson stated that “the growth in the number of officials in the Royal Navy was unrelated to any possible increase in their work” He promulgated his famous Law that applies to bureaucracies.

 

Have we in Westport uncovered a corollary to Parkenson’s Law namely that “the growth in school expenses is unrelated to any possible increase in enrollment”?

 

 Let’s examine the three items in the graph. The first item on top  of the graph is dollars contributed by Town Hall. The biggest part of this is employee benefits. The Town contributes to the Bristol County Pension Fund for employees who are not members of the teacher’s union. It also contributes to the cost of medical benefits for all employees including teachers and retirees. I estimate that the unfunded liability for these two benefits is at least $100 million. According to the actuarial reports by Sherman Associates for 2011 and 2013 this amount increased by $7 million in the last two years. So the Selectmen and Finance Committee are not only ignoring the $100 million unfunded liability, they are letting it increase by several million each year. The explanation given for inaction is that their hands are tied because the unions do not want to change things.

 

Another part of cost contributed by Town Hall is the $4.3 million 2013 Bond issue for window replacement in the Middle School due to PCB’s ($1.1 million) as well as improvements in energy efficiency in the Middle School and roof replacement in an elementary school (total $3.2 million for two items). One year after completing the work the Town has decided to close the Middle School. The most cost effective plan for the school appears to be demolition. The Town now is now budgeting $700,000 to plan a new middle school. Wouldn’t it have been better to avoid spending millions of dollars fixing up the Middle School before tearing it down? The school might soon be gone but the bond payments will linger on for another 17 years. And what confidence should the taxpayers have in the same group that managed the repair of the middle school now spending $700,000 to start planning a new project?

 

The second item on the graph is dollars spent by the School Committee. This is largely labor. Each year the Town publishes an annual report with a list of school employees and their job titles. There are approximately 269 school employees. Approximately 149 are in the teacher’s retirement program and 120 have the word “psychologist”, “coordinator”, “resource person”, “specialist”, “counselor”,  or “therapist” in their job title. Thus almost half of the school employees are not classroom teachers. This is a large amount of support or overhead for any organization.

 

Further reading of the Westport’s Annual Report shows that there are many programs that fit the definition of social work just as well as or better than they fit the definition of academic instruction. Diversity, Anti bullying, English Language Learner, Special Education, Safe at Home, etc. An alphabet soup of programs.

One small matter but one possibly indicative of the overhead in the system came up at a recent school committee discussion. The high school is going to extend certain classroom periods from the customary 50 minutes to 80 minutes. It is an interesting idea and might improve things. It was announced that there would be a carefully crafted undertaking and there would be a training program for the transition so that the teachers would learn how to handle the change. Now, virtually all of the teachers have a undergraduate degree, most have taken graduate courses, and many have graduate degrees. Do we really need a training program for our crop of college graduates so they can figure out how to reconfigure lessons from 50 minute to 80 minute periods? Do we need to add a curriculum development, transition specialist, or a resource person to the mix? Maybe a therapist to deal with the stress associated with the change.

 

The answer that school administrators give when asked about expensive non academic costs is that their hands are tied by mandates from the department of education and we would risk losing some state aid by reducing costs associated with them. The Westport School budget is $24 million of which state aid is $4 million. The aid amounts to 16% of the budget. If the Town has to spend a large part of its school monies because of mandates, it would be better off to reduce or eliminate many of them, forgo the partial payments, and take the money saved to the bank.

 

The third item on the graph shows declining enrollment. A significant number of 8th graders transfer to a different system upon completing middle school. The Town Annual Reports  show that five years ago 20% of the 8th graders went to other high schools and last year 40% went to other high schools. The numbers have not been published for this year but if the trend continues it would be over 50%. What is the explanation for this exodus? Two possibilities come to mind:

 

A)      the other schools have better social programs and students are looking for more     emphasis on: Diversity, Anti bullying, English Language Learner, Special Education, Safe  at Home, etc. They want more and bigger letters in the alphabet soup of programs.

or  B)     students and/or their parents actually are motivated to learn something and they            perceive that other schools can do a better job at this than does Westport.

You decide.

 

The United States does not do particularly well in international tests of student achievement. Typically we rank in the lower middle. In the Program for International Student Assessment released in December 2013 we were 36 out of 65 countries. Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan were at the top. Finland, Poland, Viet Nam, Slovenia and Russia among others ranked above us. Our result could be described as below average or to build our self esteem as “a low level of excellence”. The countries above us spend less than we do, have larger classes, and fewer social programs.  Viet Nam stands out because they have one of the lowest incomes of the countries tested. 99% of the population would be classified by the US government as well below the poverty level, maybe even below the Sub Poverty level. Yet they perform well above us. If people think that low income accounts for poor performance, let them explain why the educational system in Viet Nam leaves ours in the dust. The countries at the top all have one thing that we do not have – a longer school year. Our year is 180 days, theirs is between 200 and 220 days.

 

The solution is daunting, but clear and we should not be afraid to implement it:

1)      have a major overhaul of benefits, even if the union doesn’t want it. If we don’t do it the town will probably go bankrupt and benefits will be trimmed anyway.

2)      shift money out the alphabet soup of social programs and restore it to academic programs even if the education establishment howls.

3)      remove funds for a new building

4)      freeze salaries and make selective cuts in programs

5)      extend the school year to a minimum of 200 days.

 

Big changes - but they would put the town’s finances in order and make people want to move into the school system rather than move out of it. This would be an exciting innovation in education, led by Westport. Think of that! Our financial fiasco might lead to a very positive result.

 

Richard Phillips is a Westport resident. He was an Assistant Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, co author of a textbook, and the founder of International Polarizer, a high tech optical manufacturer.