Should our school system get more money, where will it go and how will it benefit our students?

Hi,

This spring rumors about the impending collapse of our Watertown school budget were being circulated among parents, newspapers and community members. As a parent I became alarmed about the possibilities and have been spending the past several months trying to better understand our school budget and how it fits into the overall municipal government and budgeting process. I began digging into the data, attending School Committee and Town Council meetings to become better informed. It became clear that funding for the Watertown School Department is nearly 90 percent reliant on the appropriation from the town. If the school was to get any additional money it would need to come from the town.

During the public hearings and meetings I have been attending many parents have been asking that the Watertown Town Council and Town Manager appropriate more money to the school system. Initially, I also wanted to stand up and give my unwavering support to push for an increase in the slice of pie that the school gets from the town but I wanted more data and information to help me understand what position I should take. A question that I wanted to feel better about being able to answer was:

Should our school system get more money, where will it go and how will it benefit our students?

Over the past months I have been in contact with the current superintendent, Ann Koufman, Director of Business Services Allie Altman, Town Manager Mike Driscoll, Town Auditor Tom Tracy and various town councilors who have have taken significant time to help me understand what data and information to be asking for and then helping me make sense of it. After these conversations I had a better understanding of the financial picture for Watertown but what was missing was how municipal and school department spending compared to other communities.

I felt that this was an opportunity to satisfy my burning itch to combine an interest in local government, software development and community participation. What I needed was a solid grasp of the questions and data. I also needed a lot of data. I think I have some of both now.

Over this past weekend I updated the website project that I have been working on http://www.nearbyfyi.com to import data from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and the Massachusetts Department of Education website. Once I had that data I was then able to build a few simple tools that allow people to compare municipal budget and education data across all 351 Massachusetts cities and towns.

The Department of Education has dome some amazing work collecting data and taking the time to normalize it for all of the Massachusetts school districts. Without their efforts and data I would have no way of being able to answer some of my questions. Not all is rosy though – the way data is made available and presented on the DOE website could be improved and it left me wanting to see the data presented differently. I knew I could do that.

The DOE provides the school district data in chunks that don't easily allow for comparison between districts. I found it challenging to see how a one communities graduation rate, demographic and spending compares to another. In order to satisfy my curiosity I ended up using a Ruby Gem called Nokogiri to write a Ruby on Rails Rake task that screen scrapes the well formatted DOE website data and then inserts that into a relational database. After getting the website data into a database this gave me the ability to write my own views and presentations of the data for the web. Here is how how I ended up presenting the data.

At NearbyFYI you can select up to three Massachusetts school districts for comparison. After I developed this tool and shared it with the Superintendent she pointed me to the District Analysis and Review Tool (DART) tool which "offers a snapshot of district and school performance, allowing users to easily track select data elements over time, and make sound, meaningful comparisons to the state or to "comparable" organizations." That sounds awesome and I'm very interested to try the tool out, but because it is locked inside an Excel spreadsheet I'll want to port the functionality to the web so those without Excel or knowledge of how to use it can get easier access to this information.

My initial reaction after being able to visualize and compare the data is that while the total school budget plays a part in how a school district is performing a better question might be how is it being spent. The people I have talked with at committee meetings and while dropping my daughter off at school have constantly compared Watertown to Waltham and Belmont. After using my comparison tool to review the data something interesting presented itself in the data: While Belmont has the best performing school they spend the least amount per pupil. This contradicted my initial belief that providing more money per student would help overall performance indicators. After viewing the data in this new way it seems to me that two very important indicators of school district performance are family income and student breakdown (SPED|non-SPED|ELL|Limited Income|etc.).

Luckily the DOE also provides a good financial breakdown for each school district that helps to show how the school district budget is internally allocated. I haven't yet pulled that data into the NearbyFYI school district comparison tool but I intend to. Something interesting shows up when you review the financial data – in 2009 only 33 cents of every school dollar is earmarked for direct teaching staff salaries. 14 percent goes to insurance, retirement programs and other items. Another 14 percent are payments to "out of district schools." A significant reason that Belmont is able to provide a lower average cost per pupil is that their "out of district schools" costs are only 10 percent of their total budget.

I think that household income, demographic and crime data will also have a part to play in this story so I'm planning on incorporating the U.S. Census data and I have an outstanding request with the Watertown Police Department for them to provide their crime data.

School budgets don't exist in isolation from other data and they are directly related to other municipal revenue and expenditures. I was able to locate an Excel spreadsheet on the Department of Revenue website that contains historical budget information for the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts and that budget data covers a period from 2000 through 2009. Yay trending data! While the data exists, visualizations and the ability to easily see budget data for each community didn't. I put my developer hat on again and used a few simple, free and easy to use tools to convert the Excel data into a CSV that I could then import into the NearbyFYI database. I created a visual representation of how the Watertown expenditures have changed over time.

At NearbyFYI you can now easily and quickly view trending information for expenditures for all the 351 cities and towns. This view allows the viewer to understand how each community allocates their budgets over time. For example you can see that Belmont has historically spent about 52 percent of their budget on education while Watertown has been around 37 percent and Waltham is at 42 percent. I think this visual view of the data helps us to understand the spending priority in each community. I hope to continue exploring the Department of Revenue website to find more data nuggets tucked away in Excel spreadsheets that are begging to be opened up.

One piece of data that is missing in all this is the long term unfunded retirement and pension debt for each community. Watertown has taken exemplary steps to start paying down the pension debt and is at least aware of the unfunded post retirement health care benefits (OPEB) debt, but without understanding how much unfunded debt our neighbors are carrying, looking at how much each town is currently spending only tells part of the story.

In summary

I think we as a community should continue to have conversations about the priority of how we allocate our budgets. Maybe it would help if each citizen were able to create a view of how we envision the pie being carved up. Given the parameters and information available how would you choose to allocate the towns funds? Would you want to see the budget for recreation or fire increase/decrease or how much emphasis should we place on paying down our long term debt?

We should press our officials to take a hard look the spending for each municipal department in the same way that we can look at the school districts. I don't believe it is fair that we have a wealth of detailed information from our school districts that allow us to perform comparisons but we don't have a similar way to evaluate the performance and numbers of the library, police, fire, public works, recreation and other departments. How does the Watertown Free Public Library stack up (pun intended) against Waltham's?

Also, we can examine each department with incredible detail, trying to pinch pennies here and there but I believe that we as a community should focus our attention on the municipal employee pension and retirement program and the huge corresponding debt.

If after analyzing the data, and understanding the impact of our current debt we as a community still want to increase the size of the pie for our schools then there are a few questions that I think we should try to answer before increasing the funding:

1. How is the current school budget distributed among the student population and how does that compare to other communities? I'd like to see a histogram that shows the exact cost distribution per individual student across the entire student population.
2. If the citizens of Watertown decide to allocate a larger percentage of money for our schools how will we know if we made a good decision?
3. How does the Watertown school district municipal allocation compare to other districts that are performing well?
4. And a follow up to No. 3 - What is the unfunded debt load for those communities we compare with?

What is next?

Next on my to do list is to pull in the U.S. Census Fact Sheet data for each community to see how other demographic data factors into school performance. I'd also love to get access to town/city crime data so that information can be co-exist with these other data sets. Another data set that I think is of prime importance is being able to view the unfunded retirement and pension debt for each community.

If you have thoughts about this blog post or comments about what you would like to see included or changed in the NearbyFYI website drop me a line.

Thanks,
Matt