4 Big Takeaways from Boston Public Schools’ FY22 Budget Proposal
From soft landings to federal aid, the FY22 budget proposal offers only a glimpse into pandemic recovery planning
This is part two of our five-part series on the BPS FY22 Budget Proposal. Read parts one and three.
Today marks 141 days until the start of Fiscal Year 2022. With the release of the Boston Public Schools (BPS) budget proposal last Wednesday, there are just 42 days left to nail down the BPS budget before the Boston School Committee budget vote on March 24, 2021. In the 3.5-hour long School Committee meeting last week, we heard about everything from attendance and assessment requirements, to student voice — but the star of the evening was of course the FY22 budget.
(For an in-depth recap of the whole meeting, check out the Shah Family Foundation podcast, Last Night @ School Committee.)
BPS Chief Financial Officer Nate Kuder walked committee members and the public through a 35-page slide deck outlining how BPS intends to respond to the ongoing pandemic. Those 35 slides are just one part of a much larger FY22 budget package, from a tight Fact Sheet two-pager to numerous spreadsheets, memos, and background documents — all of which can be found at the BPS FY22 Budget Development page. There’s also significant historical context to consider going into budget season. (We provide an overview of that context in our first post in this series and our Budget Primer deck.)
We know it’s a lot to sort though. We’ve spent the past week reviewing the numbers, with a careful eye toward what’s being shown in those numbers and the priorities they reveal — and, more importantly, what’s not shown in the numbers for next year.
Let’s dive into the four big takeaways we see from the FY22 budget proposal: more money, more students, soft landings, and federal aid.
(No time to read all of this now? Our Budget Reactions Deck features just the highlights.)
1. More Money
From the outset, we knew there would be an overall increase to the BPS budget for the next fiscal year. Last January, Mayor Marty Walsh announced a public commitment to increasing the BPS budget by $100M over the next three years. The $36M increase for next year reflects the second-year allocation of promised funding.
This brings the total BPS budget up to $1.3B for next year. But what does that look like historically?
When compared across the last five years, it’s actually a fairly modest increase; surprising, given the challenges presented by pandemic learning. Thankfully, BPS has a federal safety net to help pad out the budget. (More on that further down.)
2. More Students
Despite a 10-year enrollment decline — with a 4.5% drop in students this school year alone due to the pandemic — BPS projects enrollment will actually rebound in FY22. Enrollment projections are a tricky business: if you get the number too low you won’t have enough money to fund all the students, as the budget is based off of how many students will be served by schools. But what are the consequences and effects of over-projecting enrollment?
For the past five years, BPS has averaged a 3-percent difference between projected vs. actual enrollment:
With a projected enrollment of 51,642 students for FY22, BPS has placed a bet on an uncertain future, hoping students will return to actual enrollment figures pre-pandemic.
3. Soft Landings
In December, Kuder presented a Budget and Enrollment Update to the School Committee, acknowledging enrollment declines and potential budget implications. With the FY22 budget proposal now in hand, we can see that BPS plans to make substantial investments to support schools that have faced enrollment declines. Colloquially, these investments are referred to as “soft landings” within the budget.
What is a soft landing, anyway?
It helps first to understand how budgets are constructed at the school level. School budgets are based on enrollment projections — how many students will need to be served — and how much support those students need. That latter part of the equation is calculated using a Weighted Student Funding formula. (We’ll take a deeper dive into WSF in a forthcoming release.)
Since school budgets are largely based on the number of students the school must serve, schools that experience enrollment declines would have to face drastic cuts to staffing and programs just to stay afloat.
Enter: the Soft Landing.
As Kuder foreshadowed in December, soft landings would feature prominently in the budget. Over half of BPS schools had fewer students this year, which means 91 schools will require soft landings in FY22.
Soft landing investments are up by 633%
Last year, BPS only set aside $4.5M in soft landings. For FY22, BPS intends to spend $33M. That’s no small amount of funding — and it potentially comes at great cost in FY23. While soft landings provide school communities the stability they need for the next year as they respond to unexpected declines in enrollment, schools are forced to make hard choices about staffing and programming the following year if that soft landing funding isn’t sustained beyond that first year.
This is the most money BPS has ever spent on soft landings in recent memory.
It begs the question: What is the long-term plan for under-enrolled schools when funding for soft landings ends after FY22? And further, does BPS plan to continue making substantial investments in soft landings beyond FY22?
We’ll take a separate, closer look at soft landings next in our series, specifically around what soft landings actually look and feel like for schools, teachers, students and their families.
4. Federal Aid
As we mentioned earlier, the FY22 school budget has been bolstered by funding via a second disbursement of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund dollars provided by the federal government. Last year, BPS received $32M in the first round of ESSER funding. (A brief note: more federal aid is anticipated but it’s uncertain how much BPS would receive from this new stimulus package.)
In this second disbursement, BPS has $123M available. This funding can be spent in FY22 and FY23 — yet it’s striking to see how little BPS has allocated for FY22.
BPS has allocated just 35% of all its available federal relief dollars for FY22.
BPS has committed to allocating $44.3M out of a $123M federal pot of money in next year’s budget. BPS has directed these funds towards a set of guided principles for post-pandemic recovery, dubbed Return, Recover, Reimagine. Within that $44.3M, approximately $10.M has been dedicated to Return, $13.9m set aside for Recovery, and $20M towards Reimagine — or about 23, 32, and 45 percent of allocated federal aid, respectively.
Federal aid allocations at the student level
Using the FY22 enrollment projection of 51,642 students, that $44.M in federal aid translates into $855 per BPS student earmarked specifically for post-pandemic relief. But as we noted before, that’s only using a slice about one-third in size of the federal aid pie. There is still nearly $1,500 BPS is choosing to leave on the table in unspent, federal pandemic aid funding for every student in BPS for next year.
Remember: BPS has approximately $2,324 available to spend in federal aid on a per-student basis and is only choosing to spend $855 per student.
Let’s walk this out a step further.
Here’s what BPS recovery looks like at a very high level, from last week’s FY22 budget proposal presentation:
Of that $855 per student, only $267 of that has been set aside for pandemic recovery. As we said in our previous report, recovery doesn’t quite capture the full range of supports students need in the wake of a year plus of social and emotional trauma and academic learning losses.
Here’s what that actually looks like for students*:
*A note about funding for English learners and students with disabilities: for English learners, they’ll receive an additional $150 each for interventions and supports; students with disabilities will each receive an additional $450 for interventions and supports.
Unanswered Questions
Based on these four key takeaways —more money, more students, soft landings, and federal aid — we pose the following questions that we hope will be answered at some point during the rest of the FY22 budget process:
- What data and indicators does BPS use to calculate enrollment projections?
- How does BPS plan to address enrollment declines exacerbated by the pandemic in FY21?
- How does BPS determine how much to allocate to each school for Soft Landings?
- What is the long-term plan for under-enrolled schools when their Soft Landing funding ends after FY22?
- Will BPS continue to make substantial investments in Soft Landings beyond FY22?
- When will BPS share details of its Return, Recover, Reimagine plan? What does each stage really mean for students and families: what will Return, Recover, Reimagine look like in their classrooms? What will that look like in student performance?
- With over a year of learning loss, why has BPS allocated only 11.5% of all ESSER II funds for FY22 recovery?
- How much control will school leaders have over how to best leverage their $267 per-student federal recovery funds within their own school communities?
There are 42 days left to answer these questions.
What’s Next
The next FY22 Budget Hearing will be on Thursday, Feb. 11 at 5:00 PM Eastern, focused on individual school budgets. Head here for the Zoom webinar. Sign up here for Public Comment or submit your written testimony to esullivan3@bostonpublicschools.org by 4:30 PM Eastern on Thursday.
Our next few posts in this series will take deeper dives into several tightly-focused topics, including more about soft landings, how weighted student funding works, and who controls what money between school budgets and the Central budget.
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As always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts on our Budget Analysis Series; send us your questions and comments here.
About Boston Schools Fund
Founded in 2015, Boston Schools Fund is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that leverages grant-making, strategic partnerships, and data and policy analysis to advance K-12 educational equity in the city of Boston, particularly for those most underserved.
