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Rising SPED costs at the heart of
school budget crisis
By Jay Turner
Citizen Staff
While the
recent pledge by Governor Deval Patrick to maintain local aid at
current levels in 2011 was welcome news to be sure, school
officials in Canton still have a million reasons to be worried
about their FY2011 operating budget, beginning — and seemingly
ending — with a million-dollar shortfall tied to out-of-district
special education placements.
In their
meeting last Thursday, School Committee members went over the
topic at length yet again, and they continued to warn the
community that without real reform or extraordinary assistance,
the problem will only get worse until it eventually becomes
unmanageable.
“All these
years of trying to fit it all together … eventually you’re going
to have a breaking point,” said committee member Tim Brooks, who
filled in as chair for the absent Reuki Schutt.
As for whether
that breaking point has been reached, Superintendent Dr. John
D’Auria said it was still too soon to tell, although he
acknowledged that the district’s skyrocketing special education
costs have created a real dilemma over the past few years.
“Dilemmas
don’t have solutions,” noted D’Auria. “They have to be managed.”
However, he
said the problem with managing this particular dilemma, at least
in the short term, is that there are still several “assumptions”
attached to next year’s projected shortfall, including the
number of students requiring out-of-district services — a number
that could change without warning.
School
officials are also depending on the Board of Assessors to
capture at least some additional revenues from its ongoing
revaluation of properties, which is expected to be complete by
early to mid February, and they are hoping to once again receive
a sizable grant from the federal stimulus program.
Another “wild
card” is the state’s circuit breaker program, which partially
reimburses school districts for high-cost special education
students, although at a rate far lower than in the past. D’Auria
said Canton plans to apply for additional funds under the
program’s “extraordinary relief” provision, which only two years
ago netted the schools an extra $250,000.
Of course,
none of these funding sources are guaranteed, including the
“level funded” state aid recommended by the governor last week.
If that falls through, the schools’ overall shortfall could
climb to $1.3 million and necessitate painful cuts in a number
of areas.
But the
biggest component of any deficit next year will be in special
education, where costs have been soaring since 2003. In fact,
special education now accounts for 25 percent of all school
spending, and committee member Robert Barker said it has even
replaced health care costs as the school system’s biggest
“budget buster.”
Barker said he
hopes that the federal government will eventually foot the bill
for these legally mandated services, but until then he suggested
that the town make special education a fixed expense outside of
the operating budget so as to avoid jeopardizing regular
education even further.
“Clearly there
needs to be alternative ways of dealing with this,” said Barker,
who is also in favor of covering extraordinary special education
expenses through an annual town meeting appropriation.
Committee
member Liz Salisbury said she could even envision a day when
there will be a mass exodus of regular education students to the
private schools, leaving the public schools to serve mostly
special education and lower income students and thereby creating
even “more of a distinction between the haves and have nots.”
“It’s not that
farfetched,” she insisted.
At the same
time, Salisbury said Canton deserves plenty of credit for being
proactive in its efforts to maximize funds, and she pointed to
the school system’s emphasis on energy conservation as one
example.
D’Auria added
that the schools have also saved many thousands with its highly
successful in-house programs for students with severe
disabilities — programs that have enabled approximately 15 more
students to be educated in their own community, according to
Business Manager Ken Leon’s estimates.
Committee
member Cindy Thomas also suggested that they could help many
more children — and save the district money in the long-term —
if they added more early intervention programs at the elementary
levels. D’Auria agreed, noting that the “earlier we [intervene
with] children, the much better chance they have of making it in
the regular domain.”
And while the
size of the deficit will likely prohibit him from recommending a
lot of new programming, D’Auria did hint that his
recommendations would include some type of early intervention in
the elementary schools.
He did not get
into specifics, nor did he make any promises — not with a
deficit that could climb well over $1 million. Yet he stressed
that there are still “places where we can continue to grow so we
can build on our strengths.”
At the very
least, he said it is important for school systems to “keep an
eye on a target, even if we can’t reach it.”
January 28, 2010
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