Framingham City Council Aims to Reorganize the Schools Administration

This is the second of two articles examining outcomes of the FY24 city budget process. The first one focused on the lack of strategic vision in the way the City Council functions. This one strongly cautions against the King/Cannon/Stefanini plan to throw sand in the gears of a well-run school district by forcing a reorganization on its administration. It also places this latest scheme in a context which illuminates how much City Council punishment the school district has taken over the last 5 years and suggests that the corresponding threat to Framingham’s future demands an examination of the political philosophy driving the City Council. This article is a longer read but is the most important one I have written so far, so I beg your indulgence. Much is at stake.

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In the City Council meeting on June 20, 2023, where the city FY24 budget was finally approved, the community may not have noticed a document listed as: “Provisos to the FY24 Operating Budget”, which may be found at:

https://legistarweb-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/pdf/1982429/Provisos_to_FY24_Operating_Budget_Vote.pdf

This document lists action items which the City Council distilled from its FY24 city budget review process. All place demands on the Mayor, except for one which requires that the City Council attend to some minor housekeeping on the ‘auditor’ position.

One item, which calls for the Mayor to figure out a way to consolidate city and school services, is completely alarming, as it could entirely disrupt an efficiently run school district. It reads:

“That the Mayor report with specific strategies to consolidate municipal and school services to create greater efficiency, including, but not limited to, financial, purchasing, building maintenance, etc. within a reasonable time, but no later than January 1, 2024.”

Note that the wording assumes consolidation is a good thing and the Mayor just has to figure a way to do it. It is subtle, but the City Council has the cart before the horse. This illustrates nicely a major weakness of the City Council. It jumps to solutions, before analyzing what the problem is.

So, what is the problem consolidation would solve? Where has consolidation been used across Massachusetts?

Here is an example.

A group of small towns might consolidate their school districts to create a regional school district such as the Nashoba Regional School District, which was a consolidation of the school districts of Lancaster, Bolton, and Stow to achieve the critical mass necessary to have a functional school district. George King was first an administrator, then was moved to middle school principal in the Nashoba Regional School District, so that is where he likely picked up the idea for consolidations. The Nashoba Regional School District solved an important problem for Lancaster, Bolton, and Stow, but it was a consolidation of almost identical organizations, which is the type of consolidation most likely to succeed.

The King/Cannon/Stefanini consolidation scheme is of an entirely different type, as the city and school departments are highly functionally dissimilar. Much less likely to succeed from the get go.

The appeal of consolidation for George King, Mike Cannon and John Stefanini is that they think that by consolidating city and school departments, they can replace two highly compensated department heads by one, thereby saving a salary per consolidated department. Then that savings can fund more tax breaks, which is their highest priority. That is the long and the short of it. That is what they call an ‘efficiency’. There is no thinking about what that would mean for the city and school district. They simply want the Mayor to find a way to do it.

However, in all of Massachusetts, there is no example of a city successfully consolidating its school and municipal services in such a wholesale manner as the City Council envisions. The whole idea is rampant conjecture on the part of King/Cannon/Stefanini.

The following is an attempt to go beyond the simple-minded City Council conjecture and figure out what consolidation would look like and the problems it would create.

Multiple school district departments would be potential targets:

1. Finance & Operations, headed by Executive Director Lincoln Lynch
2. Human Resources, headed by Assistant Superintendent Inna London
3. Office of Technology, headed by Director Ann Mariano
4. Buildings & Grounds, headed by Director Matt Torti

In the eyes of the City Council, each of these school district departments has a counterpart department on the cityside with which it might be merged:

1. Finance Division, headed by Chief Financial Officer Louise Miller
2. Human Resources, headed by Director Kathy Davies Oleary
3. Technology Services, headed by Director Carly Premo Melo
4. Capital Projects & Facilities Management, headed by Director James Paolini

In the City Council’s more ‘efficient’ management world, the financial, human resources, information technology and building management functions look the same for both city and school district. If indeed those positions could be consolidated, and there are many reasons outlined below that this would be impossible, the maximum savings from eliminating 4 high paying administrative positions would be about $500,000/year and the scope and workload of the new replacement merged positions would approximately double.

This doubling of workload is one of the major impediments to consolidation success and is especially problematic for a city the size of Framingham. Further, the pool of people who have dual qualifications in both city and school side high level administrative positions, especially in finance, human resources, and information technology, is very small statewide, so even if the scheme moved ahead, there would be enormous hiring difficulties.

Even in the facilities management case, although there is more obvious synergy, cityside capital investment in buildings for FY24 ran to just $1.1 million, whereas on the school side capital investment in buildings ran to $7.2 million. That suggests right out of the starting gate that the school side facilities management operation is at such a larger scale than the city side, that consolidation would likely produce no tangible benefit to anyone.

Further, whereas on the school side, there is an effective team handling facilities, with the School Committee Buildings & Grounds Subcommittee as a key player, on the city side the City Council has no subcommittee for Public Facilities and so appears to have no mechanism for keeping track of building maintenance. That lack of City Council oversight is a further serious impediment to any merger scheme.

In this simplest of analyses, the whole consolidation idea seems fundamentally flawed, quite apart from the obvious erosion of morale for all high-level city and school administrators in Framingham any consolidation review would cause.

It is unlikely that the City Council ‘merger fervor’ will be deterred by these simple arguments, so a further set of more powerful arguments will be presented, which hopefully you will find compelling. If you are already convinced that consolidations are a bad idea, you can stop reading now and email the Mayor and City Council to let them know departmental consolidation is a terrible idea.

However, if you appreciate heavier artillery rolling onto the argument battlefield, supported by some interesting anecdotes, and want further insight into the amazing mistreatment of the school district by the City Council and the political philosophy driving that, read on.

First, a little history.

This merger idea was already dealt with back in 2021, when a Structural Deficit Committee was formed. See the City Council order 2021-084, establishing the Structural Deficit Committee, effective 7/19/21:

https://www.framinghamma.gov/documentcenter/view/42742

I served on that committee till it petered out at the end of 2021. The odd thing about that committee was that although charged with looking at the structural deficit, caused by taxing under the levy limit, George King, a fellow committee member, was not one bit interested in the structural deficit and kept on relentlessly advocating for mergers of city and school departments: finance, human resources, information technology, building maintenance.

His was simply an unvarnished attempt to force on the school district a complete restructuring of its administrative operation to somehow save the city money to fund more tax breaks. So intense was his effort to achieve that goal that in the end there was agreement to hire a consultant to look into the matter.

A Scope of Services Study re merging School and City Departments was authorized on 9/28/21:

https://www.framinghamma.gov/documentcenter/view/43254

An RFP went out and there was no response. No consultant could be found who would engage on such an unusual study. There are a very good reasons for this, which were argued in the Structural Deficit Committee meetings, but did not carry the day. Those arguments, supplemented by some case studies, are as follows:

1. By City Charter, the Mayor hires the Chief Financial Officer, currently Louise Miller, and by state law, the School Committee hires the Executive Director of Finance & Operations, currently Lincoln Lynch, and that position reports to the Superintendent. Both of these positions entail a vast amount of work, dealing with entirely different sets of laws and regulations, and report to different masters, so any attempt to merge them would cause an enormous workload for the unfortunate new financial chief and would create an impossible reporting situation where the Mayor and the Superintendent would have to have the chief reporting to both of them. That is a classic two masters reporting nightmare. That consolidation was obviously never going to fly.
2. Consolidating information technology departments has the same two masters reporting problems, and there is a compelling counter example from the Town of Milford. When Bob Tremblay was Superintendent there, Milford tried merging school side and city side information technology departments. The result was that the town went through 3 information technology directors in 4 years because the directors simply could not satisfy both masters. Merging that position failed in Milford and is highly ill-advised. See: https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/archive/2015/06/05/board-weighs-it-resignation/34407469007/
3. Consolidating human resources departments has identical reporting problems and employees have such completely different professions that there is almost no overlap in hiring processes for city and schools. Further, the Human Resources Director on the school side has to be experienced and skilled in dealing with an entirely different set of federal and state laws and regulations which apply to school districts, such as those related to special needs students. The cityside Human Resources Director has zero experience in that area. Another obvious no go.
4. Building maintenance could be the only possible consolidation target, in theory, even given the simple counter arguments made earlier, but while that may work for small towns where small staffs in town side and school side operations may not individually cover all the skill sets needed or have complete equipment sets, a sizeable city like Framingham already has a fully skilled and equipped staff on both city and school sides. Where is the advantage of a merger? Also, the two masters problem is again present. A cautionary tale may be found in Chicopee, where a Councilor ran for election on merging city and school maintenance departments, finally got that done, and 4 years later the departments were unmerged. See the article at: https://www.masslive.com/news/2022/03/chicopee-experiment-merging-2-departments-ends-with-employees-overwhelmed-work-undone.html&subscribed=auth0%7C64ac241aed2e2c7be7a13723 “CHICOPEE — The School Committee is opting out of the agreement that merged the city and school’s maintenance departments, saying it left employees overwhelmed and some work undone. …” [If the above link does not work, try this one: https://www.facebook.com/TheFraminghamObserver/posts/pfbid02E66YULbLYN4pbBk3XgbxKbeFcaXXhZ2g7NdncimgjDQFKoHzFS3ptyBHDHzrCAHWl ]

There is a very good case to be made for city side and school side departments to collaborate and share best practices, and that is already happening to a great degree, with Louise Miller and Lincoln Lynch, as they are very competent, collaborative professionals. It may be, for example, that Framingham Public Schools (FPS) payroll processing should move back to the school side, after struggling for years on the city side because city side staff simply did not have school side contract and work condition know how to do the job well. That sharing of best practices can occur across other departments as well. They don’t need to be merged.

In this newly re-energized consolidation endeavor, the City Council is surely overreaching in its zeal to find ‘efficiencies’ to fund tax breaks. It has already carried out multiple fiscal assaults on the Framingham Public Schools:

1. In its first 4 fiscal years, reduced the annual increase in the city funded portion of the school budget, the local contribution, from $3 million/year as a town to $1 million/year.
2. In the 5th year, reduced the local contribution by $5 million/year.
3. In the 6th year, reduced the local contribution by a further $5 million/year.
4. Failed to attend to the huge backlog of school roof replacements, so many schools have leaking roofs.
5. Is now labelling the school district budget increase of 7% for FY24 as ‘unsustainable’, even though that increase is necessary to fund a 4% increase in student population plus a 3% expense & salary increase due to union contracts and inflation.

After all of this financial duress, the last thing the school district needs is a severe disruption of its high performing administration, by a set of Councilors who have zero experience with consolidations. Yet George King, Mike Cannon and John Stefanini spent a great deal of time in the FY24 budget process extolling the virtues of consolidations. They had an opportunity in that process to get an opinion on the matter from the Superintendent and the Executive Director of Finance & Operations when they defended the FY24 school district budget but passed it up. Only when school system leadership team was no longer in the meeting room did talk of consolidations and ‘unsustainability’ burst forth.

In my view, this reflects a fundamental City Council lack of understanding and respect for both the importance of the school system to Framingham and the skill of its current administrative team.

Framingham Public Schools is receiving an increasing measure of recognition of its educational success. Recently, it was recognized as a major educational change maker:

https://www.framingham.k12.ma.us/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&DomainID=4&ModuleInstanceID=16445&ViewID=6446EE88-D30C-497E-9316-3F8874B3E108&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=26252&PageID=1

We need to appreciate the remarkable gem we have in the Framingham Public Schools. We have a uniquely successful pair of dual language programs, which are groundbreaking for children of our Spanish speaking and Portuguese speaking immigrant families, who are an increasingly important part of Framingham’s fabric. We are on the threshold of solving the educational challenge of successfully integrating these children into our educational enterprise, setting them up for success in life and serving as a model which school districts across the Commonwealth might well adopt in the future.

The three obstacles to completion of this educational solution are:

1. Late school buses which affect low income, immigrant children the most.
2. A substantial shortage of both special needs and English language learner classroom aides.
3. Lack of access to pre-K instruction for low income, immigrant children.

All of these problems could have been solved if the city had not removed $10 million/year in local education funding from the school district budget to replace school roofs. That decision needs to be reversed in short order through joint action by the Mayor and the City Council.

We all should celebrate the skill of Framingham Public School administration and staff, encourage them to continue their vital educational work. The community should show its support by arguing strenuously to the City Council and Mayor to make the key financial investments necessary to ensure school buses run on time ($400,000), solve the shortage of special needs and English language learner classroom aides ($2 million/year), and ensure that universal, free pre-K becomes a reality for all of our 4-year-olds in the next year ($6 million/year).

And this ill-advised City Council ‘merger mirage’ should evaporate in the ordinary sunlight of common-sense scrutiny.

Education should be the most important cornerstone of this city. It should not be the next casualty in the King/Cannon/Stefanini campaign to remake the city in a libertarian ‘lowest possible taxes’ image.

More on this libertarian thing in upcoming newsletters.

There it will be argued that most of the strategic difficulties Framingham is suffering from, and has suffered from in the past decades, are due to the application of an outlier political philosophy to Framingham government. The case will be made that Framingham is being subjected to a political experiment which appears unique in Massachusetts, has already caused substantial damage to the city, and has severe negative implications for Framingham’s future.