School District Calls for Big Budget Cuts

Deep administrative and instructional cuts are part of a budget proposed by the School District of Philadelphia April 27, including the elimination of 3,820 positions.

An overview of the budget was presented by Chief Financial Officer, Michael Masch, shortly before a School Reform Commission meeting.

A budget for the district must be approved by the end of May. As that deadline draws near, the School Reform Commission heard the full budget at its April 27 meeting.

“We are presenting to the commission a balanced budget,” Masch said.

“It is balanced with a great deal of pain. It is balanced based on the assumption that the SD will need to take and is willing to take extraordinary measures to bring revenues and expenditures into alignment. It is, as we have said, not a budget that we gladly present to the School Reform Commission or to the people of Philadelphia.”

Masch detailed the measures in the budget that are proposed to bridge a $629 million gap between revenue and expenses. Nearly $290 million of those cuts will be coming from instructional and instructional support budgets. Another $53 million is coming from reductions in central administration.

“Since only 4 percent of our spending is for central administration, that means we have had to propose reductions in spending for instructional programs,” Masch said.

“Kindergarten, early childhood programs, the instrumental music programs, athletics, counselors, psychologists, special ed., alternative ed., English language learning programs… you will see the level of the reductions that we are proposing. I will tell you that there are reductions in all of those areas.”

The proposed budget includes eliminating 16 percent of the School District’s workforce, which amounts to 3,820 positions. According to Masch, that includes eliminating 1,260 teacher positions. He could not give the number of those positions that are currently filled. Many of the positions come from a 50 percent reduction in administration, which the in the budget process.

Another major change for the upcoming school year is the elimination of full-day Kindergarten. Masch said that state funds for Kindergarten funding have been removed, and funds had to be allocated for discretionary spending to keep half-day Kindergarten. Masch called the reduction to half-day “one of the most painful cuts” that was made in the proposed budget.

The district was able to maintain funding for the second phase of the Renaissance Schools initiative.

The remaining gap between revenue and expenditures is proposed to be balanced by several measures, including district-wide efficiency measures, charter school budget relief and a proposed collective bargaining re-opener with the teacher’s union.

A decrease in revenue for the district, which Masch called “unprecedented,” was the primary factor in making the cuts necessary.  The decrease included a 19 percent cut in state funding, the end of one-time Stimulus grants, and the elimination of several other grants.

“We’ve been looking back and there has never been a year, to our knowledge, in which school district revenues have declined at all, not in decades,” Masch said.

“This is an unprecedented situation the like of which the people of Philadelphia have never seen before.”