Maybe the new super shouldn’t have hired a bunch of new high paid administrators.

This has more to do with inflation, an increase in student enrollment, and the $7 million the Worcester Cultural Academy will be siphoning away in order to keep Old Sturbridge Village afloat. The truly wild thing is that that charter school was already in the budget before it was approved.

I’m truly tired of this talking point.

Wouldn’t you prefer more teachers or better teacher pay?

I've shared the preliminary budget presentation in my Dropbox here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/w1brrf43kj6kehz/FY24%20Preliminary%20Budget%20Estimates%20March%2016%2C%202023.pdf?dl=0

(it's also in the agenda, but I know people can find that unwieldy to deal with)

In addition to the points made by u/teddygrahamdispenser, it's also due to deliberate decisions by the School Committee to:

1. hold staffing harmless from the enrollment drop two years ago due to COVID and remote learning. Our elementary enrollment took a dive; we usually would have laid off teachers and did not. We used federal pandemic aid to retain staff (an entirely supported use). That now needs to be folded back into the regular budget; we can cover it, but it's part of what's "already spent."
2. Similarly, we've been "preloading" some of our expected state funding increases due to the Student Opportunity Act; you can see this illustrated on page 28 of the presentation. Thus we have had those staff a year ahead of when state funding would have supported them.

Slides 24 and 25 then show how that shakes out over our budget increase (which is both significant and largely state funded).

I'm always glad to take questions on budget stuff.

She didn’t really. They just reassigned the way the quadrants are managed to help increase communication and clarify roles.

As WPS budget watchers will know, we've illustrated for years how incredibly underfunded our central administration is. For the current year's budget, you can find it here: https://worcesterschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/FY23-Recommended-Budget-Worcester-Public-Schools.pdf#page=402

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I'd also note that we have long since committed to a policy that no more than 1.5% of the district foundation budget will be spent on administration; it's written straight into our district policy.