In the eye of the storm

Again this spring, the Rochester school
district has been wrestling with a serious budget gap, with expenses increasing
faster than revenue. Again this spring, the district — like school districts
throughout New YorkState — has
had to put together its budget without knowing how much it will get from the
state, its largest single revenue source.

            And once
again, the district is under fire from city officials, who insist that the
district spends extravagantly.

            The
district’s proposed 2004-05 budget includes staff and program cuts. One school
will be closed, and Superintendent Manuel Rivera says that in late fall, he’ll
propose more. At the same time, the district is under pressure to boost
achievement, as Rochester’s test
scores continue to be the lowest of any district in the county. To change that,
it is trying to lower class sizes, improve instruction, and find ways to help
failing students.

            Rivera is
talking with area college and university presidents about creating small
schools on their campuses for city students. This year, the district launched a
pilot program called Dare to Care, selecting about 40 poorly achieving students
to receive intensive assistance, including mentoring and counseling. But late
last week, Rivera added that program to his hit list as he looked for an
additional $11 million in cuts.

            The new
cuts reflect an anticipated $7 million in city aid that Rivera wanted but
probably won’t get, and $4.4 million to pay school nurses. In the past, MonroeCounty provided
the nurses, but the CountyLegislature has cut
that funding. School-district officials insist that nurses are the county’s
responsibility, and Rivera had resisted putting their cost in the budget,
fearing that it would become a permanent district responsibility. He went as
far as threatening not to hold summer school, rather than absorb the cost of
the nurses or operate school without them.

            But late
last week, Rivera added the cost to the budget and made more cuts. Among
Rivera’s other recommendations: reducing the number of librarians and music
teachers, reducing “early-intervention” programs to help younger students who
are falling behind, and increasing some class sizes.

                City Council will vote on the school
budget on Tuesday, June 22. It will hold a public hearing on that  budget at 4 p.m. Wednesday, June 16, and on the
combined school and city budget at 7 o’clock that night.

            In an
interview last week, Rivera discussed the district’s budget problems and city
officials’ criticisms. An edited version of that interview follows.

City: You’re
counting on a $29 million increase in state aid. What happens if you don’t get
it?

            Rivera: At that point, we’re on
defibrillators and we’re in deep crisis. That’s where you have to seriously
consider things like shutting down two weeks early. That might violate state
law and not meet the 180-day requirement, but I honestly think that’s where we
would be in that kind of environment.

            City: Are you pretty confident of the $29
million?

            Rivera: Yeah. I think it’s going to be
in that range. I think it’s a mistake to assume that we’d be getting
substantially more than that. I don’t think we can expect that.

            City: So then you have to make up the $7 million that the city is cutting.

            Rivera: And the nurses. When I came out with the threat of closing
summer schools, in all honesty, a couple of days later, I felt like I was
standing out there by myself. You had the mayor and the county executive
faulting me for this. How cleverly they’re able to shift the burden onto the
school district.

City: The
district’s enrollment has gone down, and yet the district’s costs and expenses
keep going up. Why?

            Rivera: We have five or six different
kinds of bargaining units. And there are certain increases that we don’t even
control. There are increases in transportation and increases in fuel costs.
Health insurance has gone up. What really hit us this year was the change in
the retirement rate, like a $9 million increase.

            City: The mayor says you had no business settling
for a 4.4 percent raise for teachers. He says he went to arbitration, and ended
up giving fire and police employees a 3 percent raise. If the district had kept
the raise for teachers to 3 percent, it would have saved the school district
millions of dollars.

            Rivera: We have within the contract a
benchmarking formula, which was approved in the last contract [under former
Superintendent Clifford Janey], before I got here. Janey said: “We want to be
able to maintain our workforce. We want to be competitive in MonroeCounty.” And
what you do is, you take the top third of the districts in MonroeCounty and you
look at the average salary increase. We went through the benchmarking formula
and settled on 4.45, but only after we agreed to some other things.

            Our
teachers are asking for more dedicated time for professional development. We
agreed to a commitment of 40 hours of unpaid time devoted to professional
development. We agreed that teachers would not be paid extra to go to
parent-teacher conferences.

            We agreed
that health benefits would be pro-rated for part-time people. If you were a
part-time teacher in the old agreement — if you taught one course — you had
full coverage. We did away with that. That was a huge savings for us. We had
significant savings in the contract.

            The same
thing with administrators. We increased the amount of time they work and the
length of the year. We did away with additional pay for folks leading in-school
programs immediately after school.

            There was a
lot of movement, I felt, and good will on the part of the unions. And 4.45 was
a bargain. Because it keeps us competitive. We’re still not the highest paid in
MonroeCounty.

            The other
thing is, we want to be able to attract people. We still have trouble finding
highly-qualified math teachers, science teachers, special-ed teachers,
bilingual-ed teachers. I know people come for reasons beyond salaries, but it
is important, especially for the younger folks who are just starting off, to
have something that’s at least competitive.

            Right now,
we have a dynamic young African-American counselor who was being heavily
recruited by Greece, which
offered $10,000 more than we could pay him. RIT offered him a job; other people
have offered him jobs. And I’m scrambling around; I’ve met with him twice in
the past week just trying to keep him.

            That’s just
one example. I don’t want to lose any more of our good people — especially
some of our people of color who have grown up in this community — to some of
the suburban districts because they happen to be able to pay better than we
can.

City: The mayor
has also said that the district has increased its staff over the past several
years.

            Rivera: An immediate example comes to
mind. We received class-size reduction money from the state; I think it was
$5-$6 million. Right away, we have to add teachers to get those smaller class
sizes.

            Then there
are specialists [who’ve been helping support the district’s focus on literacy
and math]. They’re in classrooms, they act as coaches, they do demonstration
lessons, they work directly with kids, they go classroom to classroom. The
principal can do some of that, but now you’ve got instructional-support people
working directly with the teachers, a lot of whom really benefit from that,
because they’re new.

            City: Critics might say: “Wait a minute. You’ve
had mentors for teachers for a long time. Now you’re bringing in a whole new
support program. And yet we hire teachers who are supposed to be qualified to
teach reading, or math, or whatever. Those teachers should just teach. We
shouldn’t need all these extra layers to help the teachers do what they were
hired to do in the first place.”

            Rivera: The fact of the matter is that
in any business or company, there’s going to be continued growth or
development. I’m not going to sit here and say that colleges and universities
have the most ideal programs and are pumping out the best-trained people ready
to come into classrooms, because they’re not. That’s where there needs to be
some work done, in teacher preparation programs in higher education. That’s
where it really needs to start.

            In the
meantime, some of our new teachers have not had urban experience. Some could
benefit from some strategies on better classroom management. Some may not be
familiar with the kind of reading or math programs that we have in place.

            I think
back to when I was a teacher and how naïve I was about certain things — and
not necessarily the most knowledgeable. To be a high-quality educator, it takes
years to develop your own craft, if you will, and we need to continue to
support them.

City: The
Center for Governmental Research has said that the district keeps adding
programs and doesn’t their effectiveness.

            Rivera: I agree that that’s a need that
the district has. I’m not going to say that we don’t do that. We did evaluate our America’s Choice
program, we did a major evaluation. In my budget, I had recommended that we set
aside an additional $150,000 to advance this objective of getting formal
evaluations done for key programs. Whether or not we use it to hire a full-time
researcher or contract with other organizations to do these evaluations, that
is yet to be determined.

            But
wherever we make sizeable investments — extended learning programs, summer
school, Dare to Care — we want to have formal evaluations. And, quite
frankly, I think there’s a lot of validity to third-party evaluations.

            City: The mayor has complained that the district
changes its budget format from year to year, making it hard for him to track
expenses.

            Rivera: In all honesty, I can’t fault
the mayor, in the sense that we have made some adjustments because we’re
improving systems here. But we have a new software system, and we’re tracking
personnel data differently. And we’re going to be able to meet the city’s and
the mayor’s needs, and there’ll be consistent formatting. But I can understand
some of the frustrations coming out.

City: The
district will now pay for nurses. It pays for food service, for transportation.
Why don’t you just say: “Look, we’re in the business of education. Services
like transportation — the county has a transportation authority. School
nurses: the county provides health and human services. Those services are not
education. We’ve got to pare everything down to educating children. We hire
teachers; we don’t hire all these other things.”

            Rivera: In a perfect world, where all
of your community institutions and organizations are working together,
something like that would be possible. But it’s not a perfect world here. For
the Republican majority of the CountyLegislature to vote
to cut nurses in the city schools is the worst kind of example of a failure to
collaborate. It’s just beyond me.

            Even if I
were to step out there tomorrow and say: “Health-care providers, you pick
up the health-care needs of our kids,” and “RTS, you pick up
transportation,” and “other organizations, you pick up food service
— RIT, I hear you do a good job with that” — even if I were to go out
and do that, it just wouldn’t happen. Not in this climate.

            You need
leaders to come together to look at all the resources we have in this community
and how we, combining our resources, can better serve children and families and
think differently than we have over the last 100 years. There’s got to be a
better way.

            We need a
leadership that recognizes that supporting the city and city children is good
for this entire county. It’s not going to be helpful to foster an
us-versus-them kind of situation.

            The fact of
the matter is that many of our children belong to families that are eligible
for free and reduced lunches. In many cases, many of our children, when they’re
sick, may not have a primary-care physician. They may end up at the emergency
room.

            Every time
a child’s sick and makes a visit to a hospital by an ambulance, it’s something
like $750. You take away nurses who provide a lot of primary care for kids, and
it’s going to impact the county.

            If we’ve
got programs and services where we’re getting better results in city schools,
people ought to be coming on board about that. People ought to be saying: “Wow.
If this Dare to Care program, which is taking 40 kids and making a difference
even for three-quarters of them, and that’s going to reduce the dropout rate,
and that’s going to reduce what we have to pay to run Monroe County Jail….”

            If people
could look at more graduates getting out of Rochester schools
and meeting standards, how that can contribute to the overall economy, people
might think differently.

            We had a
guy here from Microsoft, which is considering a partnership with us, and he
said: “The difference between a high-school graduate and someone who doesn’t
graduate from high school is the loss of $540,000 income over the course of his
or her life.”

            We’ve got
to look at supporting education as a community-wide reform strategy. It’s not
about school-district reform. It’s about changing the community. We want better
schools, we want more graduates, we want a more qualified and educated
workforce. We want to keep those who go to college out of state; we want to
bring them back; we want a thriving community.

            And the way
to support that is to support not just schooling in the sense of five and a
half hours a day, but the education of kids, which is a 24/7 enterprise.

            What can we
provide for our young people as a community, quality academic programs for kids
after school and Saturdays, recreational activities? I was on a panel with the
superintendent from Penfield, and she herself started talking about the
inequities between schools. She said: “At my high school, we have over 90
teams. We spend over $400,000 on sports. In the city schools, on average,
you’ve got about 20 teams and spend about $59,000 on sports.”

            These
things make a difference in the lives of kids. You’re talking about character
development, team-building skills. You’re talking about structured
opportunities. Sports are a means of developing one’s character and knowledge
base. So when I talk about fiscal equity, it is to put in place additional
academic programs for kids who need them.

            We’ve got
kids who love to come to SaturdaySchool. We ran
schools during Christmas vacation, and kids came. They came because they have
nothing to do at home. They were happy to be there.

            And add to
that, what can we as a community do to support parents? There are some basic
things we can do for kids who might not have structure at home. Having an adult
mentor or an advocate in their life would make a difference.

City: The mayor
said all along that he would recommend that the city provide $7 million less
than you wanted, but you put the $7 million in your budget anyway. He was clearly
frustrated by that.

            Rivera: Well, yes, the mayor did
indicate to me that I should have a contingency, but I put my budget together a
month or two later, and I said, “Bill, our numbers are serious. We have a huge
gap. I need the $126.1 million from the city, and that’s going to be in my
budget.”

            So just as
he shared with me, I shared with him. I need $126.1 million, and that’s what I
recommended. And I went through that with him before I presented the budget
publicly. And so I’ve been pretty consistent.

            It’s the
same thing with the nurses. They’re saying I should have budgeted for nurses.
What am I, a fool? I knew that the minute I go out and do that, I’m adding $4.5
million forever. I’m not an idiot here.

This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2004.