Introducing "Becky Budget"

On April 9th, Kelly McCarthy and I introduced the Legislative Council and the audience attending the Council’s Board of Education budget hearing to “Becky Budget,” a child-sized bar graph showing the percentages we spend on various aspects of the Hamden public school system. Unfortunately, some people didn’t quite understand how to interpret her, so we put together a little letter and packet going into further detail as to what Becky means and what she can teach us. The letter is below and you can download the packet here.

Dear Board of Education Members:

At last Wednesday’s budget hearing, we introduced “Becky Budget,” a breakdown of what our Town spends on Hamden’s Public Schools. We have included Becky as part of this package, should you have use for her when considering the budget.

Becky was born out of our own desire to understand the education budget and then help everyone better visualize where the money goes, in aggregate, so that we can work together to identify areas of inefficiency and make solid recommendations for ways to direct a greater percentage of every dollar towards our students. Our ultimate goal is to see the quality of Hamden’s educational system maintained, possibly even improved, by increasing our efficiency and proactively addressing the challenge of economic sustainability.

If we hope to maintain the quality of Hamden’s schools, the Board and Town need to seriously address the expenditures represented by little Becky, consider the economic climate, plan for future reductions in State funding, and examine the Town’s overall financial plan. We truly appreciate the efforts you have made to reduce costs and increase efficiency thus far and we are encouraged by what we have seen from Hamden’s new Superintendent.

There is some perception that HART members are insensitive to the plight of our schools, but the reality is that our membership includes retired teachers, current educators, people married to teachers, those who have children in Hamden’s schools currently (or have in recent years), and even some who would like to be able to put their future children into Hamden’s schools. Being sensitive to the plight of our schools, however, does not keep us from recognizing that we cannot afford to make the assumption that Hamden will be able to maintain the status quo and sustain these percentages in the coming years.

One example that was highlighted by some HART members was the proposed Mandarin Chinese program. Let us first state that, for the record, HART has no objections to our schools teaching Mandarin Chinese. We understand that we are being provided with a financial incentive to add this program to the curriculum, but we are concerned about how this new program is going to affect the bottom line in future budget years, given how strained the budget is currently. If the incentive for the program is reduced annually (or dropped altogether), it leaves the Board (and the Town) in the awkward position of having to either: a) increase the budget to make up for the vanishing incentive; b) drop the program altogether because we cannot afford it; or c) reduce spending in another area to cover the costs. The first option isn’t particularly fair to the taxpayers of the Town and the second option certainly isn’t fair to the students who enrolled in the first year of Mandarin Chinese. The third option, however, holds possibilities if the Board can save the required funds by increasing efficiency and reducing waste.

The last thing any of us want is for the quality of education to suffer and we feel that it doesn’t have to. To address this issue head-on, we would like to see the Board of Education:

• work diligently to address our utility spending, particularly the 3% spent on electricity, but also the 5% we spend on transportation (not counting extracurricular- or special education-related transportation), a good portion of which is no doubt spent on fuel;
• reduce our spending on special education by examining what programs could be brought in-house instead of having to send our children outside of the Hamden School System, reducing both tuition and transportation fees;
• work with the Town to increase the amount of recycling performed at each school facility in the hopes of: a) reducing the amount the Town pays in tipping fees for the waste and b) increasing the revenue collected by the Town when it sells these materials for recycling (perhaps the increase in revenue from recycling could even be split with the Board and credited to your budget to fund other programs);
• begin talking with neighboring towns about the possibility of regionalizing certain budget items (e.g. back office functions such as payroll, financing, purchasing agreements, etc.) and/or costly subsections of the education program (e.g. special education, vocational training, etc.) in the interest of increasing both efficiency and educational quality.

The final of these recommendations obviously requires a long-term effort, but we cannot afford to wait until the eleventh hour to investigate this option. Change is sometimes necessary and it need not imply that the current system has failed. If these measures could consistently save us just a small percent of our overall education budget, that is literally hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions) that could be reinvested to improve the quality of our students’ education.

Sincerely yours,

Aaron Gustafson & Kelly McCarthy on behalf of Hamden Alliance for Responsible Taxation