Letter: Another “Wasteful” Schools Budget

To the Editor:

Monday evening, January 5th, the new WPS Superintendent presented to the BOE and Weston community her status quo FY27 budget. Which is mathematically about a 4% spending increase, not including the $2.6MM Capital Budget request for next year. Despite the far greater than expected enrollment decline again this year, and the additional (close to) 70 or so student loss projected in the more accurate “LOW” enrollment scenario for next year, the FY 27 operating budget includes a marginal net staff increase of about a half-time non-certified position, to just over 354 total staff members.

It is a status quo budget because for the FY20 school year, then BOE Chair and then Superintendent McKersie also requested funding for the exact same number of staff … 354, when enrollment was 300 students higher. Which is implausibly the exact same number as requested this time in 2012 by the then BOE Chair and Superintendent for FY13 … 354 staff, when enrollment was 460 students higher.

For Weston Today readers that are unfamiliar with WPS budgeting and staffing, class sizes average about 21 students, so over the past 14 years, while the number of sections (classroom teachers) has decreased by close to 22 teachers, the Central Office has created other positions to maintain total staff count unchanged … elevating some educators to a very costly and questionable full time Curriculum Instructional Leader role, adding security personnel, adding preK sections despite the collapse in K-2 enrollment, psychologists and administrative advisors, while alluding to an increase in Special education academic “intervention” staff commensurate with Covid school closure learning loss.

We watched the 1-6-25 recording of the BOE’s first FY27 public workshop and were shocked by the Central Office Senior Admin’s decision to explain constant staffing by a 30% increase in post-Covid (2024) IEPs since the FY2018 school year. The implications of their deflections and perhaps even misdirection in response to constructive bi-partisan skepticism to staffing requests seemed lost upon them. It seems apparent that a pre-Covid IEP is not likely equivalent in the intensity of educational support required for a post-Covid IEP. For if so, then the trend would suggest hundreds more students with IEPs in the coming years, and double-digit annual spending and staff increases.

It has now been a full 2 decades since the opening of WIS, from which point enrollment has steadily fallen almost without interruption by 700 students, with at least 5 more years of projected declines to enrollment levels equivalent to the year 1996, a decade before the opening of WIS, and long before the need for any portable classrooms. After this long parade of school building consultants, First Selectpeople, BOE Chairs, and WPS Superintendents, it should now be clear to every member of our community that we cannot rely upon TOW and school leadership and elected Weston officials to proactively address the fiscal and educational damage caused and implied by accelerating aggregate enrollment loss.

We had hoped the arrival of a new WPS Superintendent would usher in a new era of transparent, reliable communications and leadership from the WPS Central Office. Unfortunately, the new Superintendent seems to have elected to pick up the same enrollment, budgeting, and outdated static class size guideline script from where her predecessors left off. Whether as a Weston voter, parent, and taxpayer you care deeply about the fiscal implications of yet another year of WPS over-budgeting and wasteful spending or not, at some point, every member of the Weston community should care deeply about the credibility and completeness of the public representations of the leaders to which we have entrusted the education of our children, and the check book for our tax $s. Because if we cannot rely on budget representations as credible, perhaps we also need to question the reliability, objectivity, and selflessness of academic representations, safety and security representations, collegiate admissions representations, TAG and SpED representations as well.

As some readers are aware, we have followed closely the depressing saga of WPS budgeting and enrollment loss since late 2018. It became clear to us long ago that perhaps by design, the 12-month line item WPS budget process is an inadequate process by which to correct decades of structural WPS overcapacity and overstaffing. This latest BOE iteration will fare no better than their predecessors at achieving or even unveiling meaningful staff level improvement opportunities. That must be handled in a parallel process by the BOS and BOF focused on long-term budgeting and tax planning, or by an annual BOE process that begins much earlier with long-term operating and spending trend projections. This year’s FY27 budget request is again devoid of even a single reference that we find to multi-year planning or budgeting, other than chronically inflated long-term enrollment projections employed to justify yet another year of excessive 12-month line-item budgeting.

Rather than investing time and resources in a sensible, staff-supportive capacity draw-down plan for WPS, local Weston and WPS leadership has invested most all their collective energy and our $000,000s of our tax $s not to close an entirely excess school building, but to build another new 4th school building. The folly and irresponsibility of this bi-partisan leadership failure should by now be obvious to the majority of Weston voters. It is our expectation that long-serving incumbent leaders that have led these myriad efforts to float $100,000,000 more in school construction debt will now mount a full court press for a public referendum on school debt this coming Fall. Because they realize that enrollment continues to crash, the electoral numbers work against their spending plans … soon, if not already, there will simply be too few Weston voters with kids in the schools to have a prayer of passing an unnecessary debt plan.

As a final note, the implications of the 4% FY27 annual operating budget increase are dire for the BOF’s recently concluded affordability study of the DTC/BOF leadership’s preferred 30-year debt term. It is far in excess of the “most likely” annual WPS budget increase modeled by the BOF to determine “affordability” of proposed new school construction. The compounded cost of that debt over 30 years will make the unaffordability and consequence of the first WIS bonding look like peanuts in comparison.

—  Gregg Haythorn

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