FY2016 School Budget - Amesbury Middle School

The other day (5/6/15), Councilor Lavoie and I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Principal of Amesbury Middle School, Mike Curry. It's budget season and the Finance Committee of the City Council has its session dedicated to hearing about the Amesbury Public Schools next week, on Wednesday, May 13. 2015. As part of that and of our own due diligence, we thought it would be good to meet with Mr. Curry.

The City Council has not yet actually received a school budget proposal yet. The comprehensive City budget - including the school's - will probably not land with the City Council until the last minute, Monday or Tuesday of next week. Our hearings start on Wednesday.

In the meantime, we have the budget recommendation that was approved by the School Committee on April 1, 2015. (The Mayor is under no obligation to submit the School Committee's budget to the Council at the level or in the form that it was submitted to him by the School Committee, which he chairs).

Our conversation ranged from class population projections, study halls, strategies to support students with specialized education needs, to State 'Time on Learning' requirements, School Resource Officers, and classroom technology. It was highly informative and he was generous with his time. (I let him know that I'd be writing about our conversation.)

For the budget development process, the Mayor asked the Superintendent and her Principals to tie their school budgets to building-based Student Achievement Plans (SAPs) and to quantify and support any request above 'current' services with a priority ranking, a cost ranking, a data-based rationale, and a clear connection to the Goals and needs in the SAP. The School Committee's budget process clearly benefited this year from having this sort of exercise. The Principals and the Central Office rose to the challenge, articulated a number of worthy new priorities and narrowed it down to 'Top Two' priorities each.

Here were Principal Curry's Top Two 'new' funding priorities for FY16:

1. 1 full-time 'EAST' teacher ('EAST' stands for 'Exploratory Arts, Science, and Technology', what you might call 'electives')
2. 1 full-time SPED teacher, with specialization in the autism spectrum

For the EAST teacher, it comes down to trying to whack the same mole that AMS had to deal with last year -- how to satisfy the requirement for Secondary Educations schools to provide 990 hours of 'Time on Learning.' Forget that having electives is just good for students. Keep in mind that since 2007, the AMS overall population has decreased only by 20 (from 750 to 730). At the same time, AMS has lost:

• 3 full-time Foreign Language teachers (AMS now has no FL teachers)
• 2 Consumer Science teachers
• 1 Tech Ed and 1 Computer Ed teachers

That is seven full time teachers that have been lost and, as you can see, all were EAST positions. To satisfy the 'Time on Learning' requirements, the AMS staff have a veritable Rubik's Cube of a puzzle to solve, in getting every child over the 990 hours (things like study hall don't count towards learning, neither do the two minutes students spend going from one class to another between periods). Last year, AMS barely hung on to meeting that requirement by using Administrators and SPED teachers to create 'Academic Prep' sessions but the concern remains.  As he wrote in his presentation to the School Committee, this position "would eliminate any possibility of a study hall appearing on any student schedule in any grade level."

For the SPED teacher, a good deal of thought and analysis had gone into this request. Students, of course, advance through the school system in grade cohorts. There is currently a cohort of students at CES and AES who are on the autism spectrum that will arrive at AMS in 2016. AMS currently does not have the program or specialized staffing available for this particular group. (18-20% of AMS students have some sort of individualized educational plan.)

This means that if this is still the case when those students arrive in 2016 then we will be obligated to send those children out of district in order to meet their needs and at high cost, even with low-ball estimates. And the time to develop a program and bring on staff for them is not just in 2016-17 academic year, because the parents and guardians of those children will be looking at AMS this coming year for evidence of support; trying to budget and build a program over a year from now will be too late. Those families will already have had to seek an out of district placement.

So, we came away with a good perspective on the particular challenges that AMS and its students have. I was struck by Mr. Curry's commitment and thoughtfulness. His priority requests were clear and well-supported. Though I won't get to meet with all of the Principals before our 5/13/15 hearing, I do hope to do so before the Finance Committee makes final recommendations.