Mary's Take on the Proposed APS Budget: Part One

Voters deserve to know what School Board candidates think about the Superintendent’s proposed budget, since adopting budgets is one of the School Board’s primary responsibilities each year. I’ve also heard from many in the community who want to understand the budget better so they can figure out whether and how to participate in the budget adoption process.
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School system budgets are complicated and often long--the proposed APS budget is 544 pages of reading. Because of this, I’m going to break down my budget analysis into three installments, all of which you can expect this month.


Part One: Budget Process and Format
You might be asking, “Why is she talking about process and format? I want to know what might get cut since there’s currently a gap between expenses and revenue. I want to know whether we’re spending money on the right things.”

Two reasons for starting with process and format: first, I’m buying myself a little more time to finish going through the entire budget, which was published only a week ago. Second, I believe that we must make some changes to the budget process and format in the years ahead, and I hope you will join me in calling on APS staff and the School Board to do just that.

Here’s a big problem: there’s simply no good way for the public to read and understand the budget as it’s currently presented. People with the time and financial literacy skills needed to digest all the information are at a distinct advantage in advocating for programs and line items they care about--and that’s a real equity issue. 

Does a school district budget have to be 500+ pages, inclusive of the “executive summary” which is 206 pages long? No.

Consider these nearby examples, all from school systems larger than our own:

• Montgomery County: 434 page FY21 budget, 88 page executive summary. MCPS also produces a two-page budget overview flyer in seven languages at the beginning of its budget process. (The APS Budget at a Glance is available only in English.)
• Loudoun County: 431 page FY21 budget, inclusive of a 35 page executive summary. In the interest of transparency, LCPS also publishes School Board Question & Answer packets that show what questions the School Board members asked at each meeting and work session, and how LCPS staff responded. 
• Prince George’s County: 294 page FY21 budget. Like Loudoun County, PGCS is also publishing questions that School Board members are asking about proposed budgets before they get adopted.

We also need reforms in the budget process so that the community has time to understand and weigh in on the budget, and so that we’re making full use of the incredible talent and commitment within our citizen-led  Budget Advisory Council (BAC).
 
Here’s how it’s currently working:

1. APS staff prepares a budget, guided by budget direction that the School Board (aided by the BAC) develops in late summer.
2. The Superintendent presents a proposed budget to the School Board. This year, that happened on February 25.
3. The School Board and the BAC have six weeks to read, understand, and revise the budget before they approve it on April 8. The BAC is supposed to advise the School Board on budget matters, but they’re getting their first look at the full budget at the same time the School Board does.
4. The community has the same window of time to understand the budget and contact School Board members. The one public hearing on the budget occurs a little less than four weeks after the proposed budget is published--this year, the hearing will take place on March 23.

In Montgomery County, the Superintendent proposed a budget to the School Board on December 15. There were multiple public hearings and work sessions before the School Board adopted the budget two months later on February 9.
In Prince George’s County, the Superintendent proposed a budget on December 10, followed by public hearings in January and February before the budget was adopted and sent to the County Executive on March 1.
But you know what? We don’t have to look to other counties to come up with a better process--because our own Budget Advisory Council proposed one in the excellent End of Year Report it delivered to the School Board last June. 

BAC members made thoughtful recommendations that will improve how budgets are structured and presented, and that will involve the BAC itself earlier and more meaningfully in the process--the way that citizen advisory councils are supposed to be engaged. 

Recommendations that I endorse include:

• A more transparent, early preview budget process (BAC provides additional detail about what this could look like).
• A format for future budgets where the budget change is proposed, category of need is assigned, and the pros and cons of making the change are explained side-by-side in sufficient detail.
• A systematic and comprehensive review of major APS cost centers, done in a collaborative and transparent way so that the community can provide input. BAC calls the current approach to budgeting “unsustainable given our projected enrollment growth and a natural aversion to facing the increasingly hard facts and difficult decisions that will be involved with deeper cost cutting. It is obligatory for the APS leadership to address the cost side of this structural equation before the revenue cavalry is called again.”

Like the Budget Advisory Council, I also believe we may need to renegotiate the revenue sharing agreement with the County Board to establish a higher share for APS as a “funding floor.” BAC observes, “Doing this is merely acknowledging future deficit and political realities and serves mostly to traverse that territory ahead of the budget season instead of during it.”

Before BAC presented its end of year report to the School Board, it provided APS staff with an opportunity to review and comment on the report. Assistant Superintendent of Finance and Management Services Leslie Peterson and her team declined to do so.

I want to give them a pass for this in 2020, since they were dealing with a pandemic and working hard to close the FY21 budget gap. But moving forward, this has got to change.
We really need improvements in the process like the ones that BAC has proposed--and these are things I will work for as a School Board member. If you agree with me, I hope you’ll support my campaign.

Next week in Part Two of my budget analysis, I’ll cover the proposed expenditures. Then in Part Three, I’ll focus on the tiers of proposed cuts.

If this information was useful to you, I hope you’ll share it with friends and neighbors. In order to provide all kids with an excellent education, schools need financial resources, human talent (staff and volunteer), and capital resources (the facilities in which teaching and learning take place). The APS budget fuels all three--so we have to get it right.