Framingham Student Behavior Problems Caused By Defunding the Schools

On February 6, 2024, the City Council called Superintendent of Schools, Bob Tremblay, in to ‘explain’ safety at the high school, given the student cafeteria fight, which occurred on Tuesday, January 23, 2024, at Framingham High School, and was reported widely in the news media. It would have been better for the matter to be discussed in a School Committee meeting, as that is the right venue for such a discussion, since the School Committee has authority over the school district and any initiatives to solve the problem have to come from that body.

Nonetheless, valuable information was produced in the discussion, which began with Bob giving an overview of the problem, broadening it to include safety in schools across the district:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N33jfuTGlz8

and providing a supporting document:

https://legistarweb-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/pdf/2424525/FAQs_for_Students_Behaviors_and_HS_Plan.pdf

Feedback from City Councilors followed.

Councilor Mike Cannon lead out with unrelenting criticism of the Superintendent, which included Mike’s standard posturing on how the City Council was so generous in the last two school district budgets, even though all budget increases for the schools in FY23 and FY24 were 100% funded with increased state Chapter 70 education aid for the schools. He also criticized what he called a ‘top heavy’ King Elementary School administration. ‘Top heavy administration’ is always the favorite attack of school district critics. Bob has defanged that criticism by having one of the leanest central administrative staffs in the state, and it is not at all clear that this unexpected attack on King’s administration has any merit.

Fortunately, other Councilors treated the Superintendent with appropriate respect, as they asked constructive questions and made comments.

Helping Bob with his response, the acting Principal of the high school, Mark Albright, provided some very useful insights on safety improvements which are being put in place at the high school.

Three facts became quite apparent for the high school:

1. More staff are needed to improve safety, especially to monitor the hallways, bathrooms, and cafeteria, and that staff build up is in progress.
2. Overcrowding is a problem.
3. 48 students out of 2,500 are causing most of the problems.

Trouble making students cannot simply be suspended and forgotten, like they used to be, with really bad results. State law ensures that they are not forgotten, and mandates efforts which must be made to solve their problems and get them learning again.

In line with this, the Superintendent has a plan to expand the program which supports students who have not been able to succeed in a traditional academic setting. That program is currently located at the Thayer Campus on Lawrence St. It has a 50 student capacity and limited facilities, with no gym or cafeteria.

Bob’s expansion plan shifts this program to the Farley building, which has gym and cafeteria space and served MassBay Community College students for many years, until they recently moved to a brand new facility at 490 Franklin St. The move of the Thayer Campus into Farley would increase the Thayer Campus capacity to as much as 250, and would clearly be a game-changer in solving both overcrowding and behavior problems at the high school.

That solution will cost money, and it is critical that the City Council and the Mayor support the additional staff that will entail. It also will require an associated renovation of the Farley building, which will cost in the range of $8-10 million to bring it up to code and install sprinklers throughout the building, which is mandated by the state whenever a school building is renovated.

These costs should be packaged up into a ‘school staff & student safety’ component of the FY25 operating and capital budgets for the Framingham Public Schools. That will be a test of the City Council’s mantra articulated by its Chair, Phil Ottaviani, that it is in the ‘solution business’.

In the last two fiscal years, FY23 and FY24, the Mayor and the City Council have lowered the city contribution to the school district budget by a total of $10 million/year. In FY 22, the city’s contribution to the Framingham Public Schools budget was $89.8 million. In FY24 that had dropped to $80.0 million.

It is time for that $10 million/year to come back to the school district to solve its most pressing problem: student and staff safety in the schools.

A solution for the Framingham High School is crystal clear.

What about the 9 elementary schools, the 3 middle schools and the pre-K program?

Vital input on the scale of student behavior problems in those schools was given in the meeting when teachers used public comment to give their take on the safety situation in the school district. Most of the commentary came from teachers at Cameron Middle School and King and Dunning Elementary schools.

Their view was that in the last 2-3 years, things have gone downhill to such an extent that they need a sea change in how things are done to improve the physical safety of students and staff. That includes:

1. Better response to real situations teachers have to face, which includes increased permanent support staff on site at schools, to deal with problems immediately.
2. Faster response time for wading through the bureaucracy, which currently impedes putting in place the supports students need, and can take up to 45 days.
3. Better communications with the school district administration.
4. Better leadership on how to solve the rising problems.

The call for more staff support by teachers, who are dealing every day with classroom reality, was universal and powerful, with strong emotions close to the surface and the incredible commitment of our teachers to this school district compelling. It was immensely ironic that they delivered this message to the City Council directly, as the City Council has been the primary impediment to expanding support staff in the schools, in each of its 6 years since Framingham became a city.

In the past, George King, John Stefanini, and Mike Cannon seemed to get headaches every time an FTE (Fulltime Equivalent position) was added to the school district. However, in the last election, John Stefanini was defeated in an upset by Leslie White Harvey, fueled by an electorate eager for change. Hopefully King and Cannon will take note of that and reverse their prior opposition.

It is hopeful that the new City Council will look at the school district in a much more organic supportive fashion and in the FY25 budget, being constructed as we speak by the school district, support the investments in students and staff which are critical to their success.

Three strategic problems impede a solution to the current crisis:

1. Late school buses, which impact 40% of students every school day and help put our children in a frazzled state which has to be contributing enormously to the pervasive difficulties we see in the schools. As Adam Freudberg noted recently, the city had an opportunity early in 2022, offered by NRT the bus company, to increase bus driver pay by $5/hour, at a cost of $500,000/year, which would have largely solved the problem, but the city administration passed that up, and by rebidding the contract last summer increased bus driver pay by just $2/hour at a cost of $1.8 million/year. That was the biggest procurement fiasco one could imagine, and resulted from the Mayor's and City Council’s reluctance to invest money in the school district, coupled with poor legal advice and a struggling procurement department. This busing problem has to be solved if we are to deliver students to school each day with the right mindset to eagerly engage in learning. The financial ball is squarely in the City Council’s court on this issue as well. This has to be addressed in the upcoming FY25 school district budget.
2. The huge shortage of classroom aides, who are critical to providing classroom teachers with the support they desperately need. Low compensation is a giant issue here, as aides have 25% annual turnover, and are 15-20% underpaid based on market comparisons. In 2022, the city had an opportunity to boost their pay in a new contract but forced an inadequate 2% annual pay increase on aides, which was exactly the wrong move. It guaranteed a continuation of the shortage. We are talking about more than a hundred vacant positions. The financial ball is squarely in the City Council’s court on this issue as well. This has to be addressed in the upcoming FY25 school district budget.
3. Stalled pre-K expansion, which is a huge front end problem for the school district, which is now seeing 40% of kindergartners entering with no pre-K experience and many of them non-English speaking. The renovation of Farley is also critically important for this effort, as it could add 6 pre-K classes or more to help solve the problem. In the last School Committee meeting on February 7, 2024, the Superintendent explained how the Blocks pre-K program has 180 special needs students who are out of compliance with state requirements, as they can only be accommodated for a half day program, rather than a full day program. He tried to move 2 pre-K Spanish immersion classes to another space in the city, to solve the special needs capacity problem, but parents of children in the Spanish immersion classes rightly pushed back on that, as did the School Committee. There is no viable solution for this problem, other than a Farley pre-K expansion. The financial ball is squarely in the City Council’s court on this issue as well. This has to be addressed in the upcoming FY25 school district budget, with a plan to not only add 6 classrooms at Farley, but, in the next year or two, to bring pre-K capacity up from 300 slots at Blocks to 800-900 across the city to serve every 4-year-old in the city at no cost to their families.

The City Council has raised the alarm.

The schoolteachers have articulated the problem.

The Superintendent has provided the basic elements of a solution.

The support to solve Framingham’s most pressing problem has to be forthcoming from the city, with the Mayor and City Council committing to a sea change in funding the school district.

The $10 million/year which the Mayor and City Council removed from the local taxpayer funded contribution to the school district in the FY23 and FY24 budgets, has to be returned to the schools in what will prove to be the most critical decision Framingham has made in two decades to ensure that our students and our teachers thrive, and the trajectory of the city rises for us all.