The
RochesterSchool
District has cut teachers and other staff and
is closing one school. And it still faces a budget shortfall of as much as $36
million, unless state aid closes that gap.
           With less than a month to go in this
school year, district officials aren’t sure they’ll offer summer-school
programs. The reason: outside financing hasn’t been found for school nurses,
and the district says it can’t afford to fund them.
           The major parties involved in
funding the Rochester district are
at each others’ throats. State leaders are now nearly three months late in
adopting a state budget, on which the district depends heavily. For more than a
year, state leaders have been under a court order to revise the state-aid
formula, to increase funding to urban districts. Instead of acting, state
leaders have resorted to name calling.
           And at the local level, city and
school-district officials are every bit as angry at one another.
           At the center are the schools, and
the students, of the state’s most poverty-ridden school district. Rochester’s student
population has grown poorer — and more heavily African American and Hispanic
— over the years. The district’s test scores and graduation rates are much
lower than in the surrounding suburbs. And despite years of reform efforts,
school restructuring, and new teaching systems, the Rochester district,
like urban districts throughout the country, has not been able to turn things
around.
           The children who do well in Rochester schools —
and there are many — tend to be those from more affluent, better-educated
families.
           City officials and other district
critics insist that the district can be successful, despite the poverty.
District officials say the same thing. But there the agreement ends.
           A study of reports from the state
Education Department and the Monroe County School Boards Association shows a
growing disparity between the resources and programs of the city and many
suburban school districts.
           For example, suburban teachers are
paid more. In the widely publicized Rochester school reform
of the late 1980s, teachers received a substantial salary increase — though
not as much as was generally perceived. Most suburban districts soon outpaced
that, however.
           Suburban schools tend to have more
experienced teachers, and more specialty resources such as music teachers and
computers.
           District officials say they need
more money. Critics, including Rochester Mayor Bill Johnson, say the district
could do a far better job with what it has, that it has enough money to do what
it needs to do.
           “I don’t consider this a poor
district,” says Johnson. He repeats a charge that he and other critics have
made before: that the district deliberately makes its budget hard to analyze, and
changes it every year, to hide waste and increasing costs.
           Johnson says he is particularly
troubled that the school district’s costs have increased while enrollment has
declined.
           Johnson insists that the district
could control its costs if it were willing to make tough decisions. For
example, he says, the district had no business signing a contract that gives
teachers a 4.4 percent raise in each of the next two years when the inflation
rate is far lower.
           And Johnson and other critics charge
that the district operates expensive programs and adds new ones and new staff
without analyzing the results and eliminating obsolete programs.
           Patricia Malgieri, president and CEO
of the Center for Governmental Research, says the school district seldom studies
the effectiveness of its programs. At a recent hearing on the city’s budget,
Malgieri said the school district “must be forced into making tough decisions
that it has somehow been unable to make” previously.
           School Board member Rob Brown says
he has challenged critics to name the programs they say are wasteful and
ineffective. The district does track the results from its programs, he says;
the state reports on standardized-test scores of every school, every year.
Too often,
Brown and others say, the district’s critics want to use business criteria and
accounting methods to measure schools, teachers, and children’s performance.
Education, they insist, has too many human factors to be judged that way.
           There are some parallels between
business and education, however, and they increase the stress on the district.
Both businesses and school districts have a variety of constituents, and the
interests of some often conflict with the interests of others.
           Corporations must listen to the
demands of stockholders, whose interests are higher profits and higher stock
prices. But they must balance those demands with those of employees, whose
interests are their own needs and those of their families: good salaries, good
working conditions, good benefits. And employees with strong unions make sure
those needs are voiced.
           The school district’s constituents
include taxpayers. And they include teachers, who, like the employees of a
business, are concerned with wages and benefits. In addition — significantly
— Rochester teachers are
members of one of the state’s most powerful unions . And that union is a
crucial district ally in lobbying for state aid.
           The constituents of a business
include its customers, who must be satisfied, or they’ll buy from a competitor.
And the school district must satisfy students and parents.
           Because of declining enrollment, the
school district will be under intense pressure to close schools over the next
several years. It is closing Josh Lofton high school this year. Superintendent
Manuel Rivera had also planned to close School 36, but he bowed to the pleas of
parents and staff and gave it a reprieve. He made it clear, however, that he
plans to close more schools, soon.
           When he proposes those closings,
there will be more protests from more parents and staff. It will be surprising
if Rivera does not consider closing one or more of the elementary schools in
the city’s more affluent areas: small schools with disproportionately fewer
students from their immediate neighborhoods. And there, the district will face
a particularly troublesome dilemma: parents in those schools tend to be well
organized and active. And some of them can afford to send their children to
private schools — or move to the suburbs.
           Neither would be in the interests of
the school district, or City Hall.
Voting
on the budget
The
Rochester school
district, which receives a substantial amount of funding from the city, must
have its budget approved by City Council. Council will vote on the proposed
budget on Tuesday, June 22, and will hold a public hearing at 7
p.m. Wednesday, June 16. The hearing will be in Council
Chambers, third floor, City Hall.
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2004.
