$chool Choice - Part IV of IV

All of the funds that are taken in by a district for school choice go into a “School Choice Revolving Account.” As you may have read in the School Choice Parts I – III blog posts, the total school choice amount for Petersham, Orange, and Mahar in the 2010 – 2011 academic year was more than in the neighborhood of $1,636,000.00.

At Mahar, school choice funds may only be expended by a majority vote of the school committee. While these funds can be used to fulfill any need of the district, at Mahar they have almost solely been used to reduce the assessments to the towns in each fiscal year. What this means as that the school committee has continually voted to utilize this money as a source of revenue in each operating budget.

At Orange Elementary this has not been the case. Funds from school choice have been continuously utilized to fill gaps that existed in previous operational budgets. This practice brought about a problematic situation at the end of the last school year. You see, when the school choice account reached a balance of $0.00 and the amount budgeted by the town for the purpose of elementary education was at $0.00, there were still unpaid bills in an amount that approached $100,000.00.

This happened because money was being spent before it ever arrived in the district’s school choice account. When the final payment from the state came in less than expected, there was an obvious deficit. This year we will be holding school choice funds with the intention of appropriating them as a source of revenue in the Fiscal Year 2013 budget. So if all goes according to plan, rather than having $5.1 million dollars in fiscal year 2013, the district will have more like $5.5 million dollars at its disposal.

This will return people to work and hopefully provide some funding for other serious needs. But….what if we were able to combine the three school districts’ school choice accounts and have one larger pot from which we draw funds? What if all of our teachers return to work and we are able to increase our school choice students by just five students per grade, Pre-K – 12? Well, we would have close to $2,000,000.00 in school choice revenue.

If the $2,000,000.00 were to be attributed to the entire budget of a Pre-K – 12 regional district, this means that 10% of the school budget would be covered by school choice. In previous blogs I informed readers that on average schools in the Commonwealth are funded at 13% more than the minimum allowed in “Net School Spending.” In the model I have just described, the towns would have only to contribute the absolute bare minimum required by law, and our schools would be funded at very close to the state average.

Let’s face the facts. The children in our region should be given the opportunity to compete with children from other regions. A child in Orange should have the same educational opportunities as students from Leominster, Shrewsbury, and Westwood. You see, when colleges accept students they accept them based on what they know and how well they demonstrate what they know. Our kids should at least have the chance to know what other students know. They will not have these opportunities in huge classes with old textbooks, broken computers, and fewer teachers.