Once again, its posh Weston atop the list of the school’s best public high school. Dover-Sherborn, Lexington, Wellesley, Concord-Carlisle, Bedford, Brookline, Wayland, Newton North and South fill out the list of the state’s best high schools, according to this story in The Globe.

Belmont ranked a paltry 29th out of 150 in last year’s high school rankings, despite landing numerous, national awards, including a Silver Medal on the U.S. News and World Report list of Best High Schools and an award from Forbes Magazine and Great Schools that listed Belmont as the top district among towns with a median home price between $600,000 and $799,000.

Why the sharp discrepancy in rankings? Simple: the Boston Magazine list ranks all the state’s school districts on their deviation from a mean for each of the data points that Boston looks at. Those include touchy issues for Belmont like Student-teacher ratio, where Belmont had the highest ratio (15.7:1) of any school in the top 50 districts, excepting Boston Latin. Per pupil spending is another measure that Boston weights heavily – and we look bad there, too – well below the state average and a full $2,000 per child per year less than the lowest spending high school in the Top 10 (Wellesley High, as it turns out). Not that I’m making comparisons, but…ah what the hell…Weston spent $5,700 more per student than Belmont in 2009. In other areas, we do well: MCAS and SAT scores, graduation rates, etc. all push Belmont up to the top 20% of school districts state wide despite high achieving, middle class communities that are outspending us.

It will be interesting to see if Belmont hangs on to 29 or slips further in the 2010 rankings, but with the failure of the Prop 2 1/2 override in June leading to larger class sizes, among other district-wide changes, its safe to assume that Belmont will be moving down this yearly ranking rather than up it. And, as we’ve pointed out before, lower rankings tend to be bad for homeowners in a variety of ways.

I have no doubt the No Freeloaders of the world will take all kinds of umbrage to these rankings: how subjective they are, how our kids get a great education whatever these studies say. But the bottom line for Belmont is really what prospective home buyers (read: families) read and perceive about the communities they’re considering plunking their hard earned cash down in. In all likelihood, Boston Magazine is going to give them a couple dozen towns to consider before “Belmont,” and that…just…sucks.

My 2c.

As many of you who followed this debate in town when the issue of funding full day kindergarten came up in 2007 and 2008, there’s a common belief, based on some academic research, that more kindergarten doesn’t end up improving academic outcomes, at least in populations that aren’t at risk to begin with.

The times article takes up that issue of the “fade” effect by talking about a new study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, who observed that earlier studies about the benefits of early childhood education Programs like FDK based their conclusions on analyses of student test scores in middle and high school, rather than on life outcomes like a child’s health or eventual earnings.

When Chetty and fellow researchers looked at those broader measures, by studying the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s,they discovered that their success in life correlated strongly with their exposure to high quality early education.

From the Times article:

“Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.”

How much more? The economists calculated that a 5 year old who benefitted from an excellent kindergarten teacher who was able to improve their test scores from just the 50th to 60th percentile earned $1,000 more a year by age 27 than a student who didn’t get that boost.

Check it out- there’s a link to the researchers’ presentation, too. But this brings us back to the argument about cuts without cutting – the way that withdrawing resources from our kids education (libraries, anyone) seem harmless, but can actually have large and unforseen consequences later on.

What can I say?  I showed up to this meeting an ardent supporter of the SC stance on funding for freshmen athletics, left early on tasting a bit of the frustration with a Committee that seemed officious and tone deaf about the message from voters, and wound up the (late night) meeting at home feeling about as divided as the Committee (and our Town) about what the right course is.

Parents packed the School Committee meeting to speak in favor of Freshmen athletics

If you weren’t among the 100 or so folks who were in the room or didn’t catch it on cable,  this was one of those occasions where everyone was in agreement on what they wanted to see, but bitterly divided about how to get there.  Everyone at the School Committee table and in the administration and in the audience wants to see freshmen sports, middle school track and a vibrant athletics program for Belmont public school students. The difference is really about whether you focus on the forest, or the trees.

The administration and the School Committee see the forest: a school system facing $2 million in cuts from the needs-based budget, many of which are critical and affect every student, district wide.

The folks in the audience are seeing the trees: the $40,000 or $60,000 that’s needed to fund some subset of eight freshmen sports that students have enjoyed for a long time now and that they desperately want to continue.

What I heard was two things: our Superintendent and school leadership council saying: we have bigger fish to fry. Freshmen sports are important, but they’re not a priority. Textbooks are a priority. Elective courses are a priority. Professional development is a priority, building maintenance is a priority, but money for those things is gone — lost with the override. And those changes have already happened: the teachers were fired, the librarian was fired, the library aids and curriculum directors were fired. We’re sorry you’re not happy about the sports piece, but its done.

“There’s something that’s happen to every student’s experience by not having curriculum directors in every critical area,” Superintendent Entwistle said, focusing on just one aspect of the cuts that were made after the failed override vote. “We don’t have a curriculum director in science, in social studies, in foreign language. It won’t be as obvious as not seeing the Freshmen field hockey team on the field, but there’s something that’s happening to every single kid’s opportunity by not having those curriculum directors in place. But we don’t. They were part of the override budget and those things were decommissioned, as was freshmen sports. So were elementary librarians. They’re gone.”

What else is gone? Library and academic support at Belmont High, MCAS support – both gone. Guidance: cut from critically understaffed to what is basically token staffing. The list keeps going…

“If you gave me $45,000 would it go for Freshmen sports? No,” Entwistle said.

What parents were saying is: our bodies in this room and the folks who have pledged their money to this show you that this program matters a lot to us. This isn’t the way we’d like to fund it, but its better than not offering the sports at all.

There were also some territorial and policy issues. Supporters point out that the school department accepts private donations for lots of things, whether that is from the Foundation for Belmont Education, the PTAs or POMs (Parents of Music Students). What’s the big deal with accepting more private funds for Freshmen sports? More than one School Committee member voiced concern about having the year long deliberative process that produced the school department budget upset by a small group of community members who – in essence – wanted to force their hand by directing earmarked funds to restore a beloved program. There was concern about the burden on school administrators like Athletics Director Jim Davis who must now coordinate with a private fundraising effort and managing the flow of donated funds and track those dollars once they’re in the system. There were concerns about the ability of organizers to raise the private funds both in the short term and going forward, once the light and heat over this cut dies down. There were questions about the equity of relying even more on fees when many families in town can’t afford to pay the (sky high) fees that are already in place.

Community members seemed both perplexed by the technicalities of the School Department’s budget, which totals $39 million and involves sundry revolving accounts and earmarks. Perplexed, also, by the reluctance of the Committee to accept private donations, and downright angry about the fact that the burden would be felt by rank and file students who want to play sports, but don’t have the skills to make the Varsity or Junior Varsity teams. Incoming freshmen spoke in favor of freshmen sports – spoke about the difficulty of making JV or Varsity teams. Older students talked about the importance of freshmen athletics to getting them interested in playing at a higher level.

It went back and forth like that for…well…hours, with a number of tersely worded motions put forward (all by SC member Dan Scharfman) and failing to pass an evenly divided Committee who, while supporting the idea of private support for school athletics, were nervous about the targeted and slap dash nature of the specific proposal at hand and in favor of a broader proposal that opened the door to private fundraising, in general for athletics. Town Meeting member and local institution Joe White spoke passionately about the need to give average kids a chance to play sports – going so far as to promise a blank check to fund the Freshmen athletics program for the fall.

In the end, the Committee voted unanimously for a vaguely worded motion that opened the door to allow private fundraising for sports, but fell short of earmarking the funds for Freshmen sports. Athletic Director Jim Davis will ultimately be the Decider, as G.W. Bush famously said. This all with provisos about the need to have cash in hand by August 1st to give Mr. Davis and at set dates thereafter (November 1 for Winter session and February 1 for Spring session). The burden now will shift to Freshmen sports’ backers to make good on their promises. No doubt the money will be in hand for the fall, but the burden of drumming up tens of thousands of dollars in private funding three times a year will, I expect, be daunting – but we’ll see. There’s already a tremendous amount of direct, private funding of Belmont’s education system, whether it is through the PTA or POMS or FBE. The Freshmen sports people will have to move about a crowded landscape with those groups – or find a way to piggy back on them. I wish them luck.

As for myself, I stand with Mrs. Amanda Greene, a town member and mother of an incoming freshmen and current BHS Junior who said, in essence, that “this is no way to run a School District.” Belmont is falling into a dangerous pattern of behavior in which disengaged voters get irritated by the outcome of issues they haven’t paid attention to, then use their clout to pressure officials to make it right – somehow, anyhow. Athletics are important, but so are music, art and theater. If they’re important, then they’re worth the public paying for and making available to everybody.

Freshmen Athletics on chopping block (photo courtesy of Belmont Patch)

The School Committee has tacked on an extra meeting onto its calendar to address the pressing issue of funding Freshman Athletics at Belmont High School.  The meeting will be held on Monday, July 12, 2010 between 6:00pm and 10:00pm in the Community Room at Chenery. Belmont Patch has the details here.

What’s this all about? Well…we all knew that the fallout from the failure of the Prop 2 1/2 override vote in June would be swift and painful. And so it is.

In a message to the Belmont listserv at the time,  I predicted that one of the early flash points with the administration would be over the cancellation of Freshmen athletics at the High School, and that the School Committee would feel pressure from parents who sought to privately fund that program. This prediction (which wasn’t so much soothsaying as connecting the dots) has proven accurate.

If you checked out the June 23, 2010 School Committee meeting (click this link to the fun on Blip.TV ) and you’ll know what I mean. This was technically the last SC meeting of the year but…wait…there’s something going on. What are all those PEOPLE doing sitting in the audience?!?!

You guessed it: they’re parents of CMS students (mostly) who are concerned that Freshmen athletics will be cancelled for the 2010-2011 school year because of lack of funds. Frankly, I was amazed throughout the campaign at the lack of interest or concern about that proposed change – especially by parents with kids at the Middle School, who would be directly affected and who would be forced with the unpleasant reality of fit, athletic and motivated kids being sidelined for an entire school year. As our BHS Principal Mike Harvey and our coaches made clear throughout the budget season – Freshmen athletics are critical to helping many students adjust socially to life at the High School, find their bearings and, heck, keep out of trouble. As the cops like to say: “Sports not Courts!”

I’m not sure why the warnings about that cut didn’t sink in – its probable that the YES campaign (of which I was a part) didn’t do a good job getting the message across to the right constituencies in town, or perhaps that residents and parents had a naive faith that the override would pass, even without their interest or vote. Or maybe they just weren’t paying attention. No longer. Now that the axe is falling, folks are trying to figure out a way to raise funds for athletics privately and shield Freshmen sports from it.

This is a noble effort and, certainly, neighboring towns like Arlington are going even further to bridge that town’s $3.9m budget deficit with its Bridge the Gap program. I have no doubt that concerned parents could raise the $40,000 or so necessary to save Freshmen sports this year, but that just raises more questions than it answers.

• Where will funding come from next year?
• What happens when the cuts extend beyond freshmen athletics to all athletics and extracurriculars?
• How will children from families of limited means take part in fee-based athletics? Does this create a two tiered district of active, wealthy kids and less affluent, idled kids?
• Is there a quid pro quo - do parents get a say in how the program is run? Do kids of parents who donate automatically “make the team”? or is it still a matter of picking the best kids for the team, contribution or no? Do families that donate whose kids don’t make the team get a refund, and how do you sustain the program that way?

These aren’t just a hypothetical questions. The Schools have already been steadily shifting costs from the operational budget to fees. Belmont families with kids in the public schools already pay $1 million in fees to support everything from athletics to elementary instrumental music.

The fact is clear and history is our guide: union negotiations and regionalization aside, educating our kids will cost more money five years from now than it does today, and even more 10 years from now. Unless the town radically changes the way it runs its schools, or finds a way to reallocate or increase revenues, cuts to school programs will have to go deeper to live within level budgets. Those cuts will eventually touch everything that isn’t mandated by the State or the Federal government or funded by external sources.

Of course, as Rahm Emmanuel famously said: “You should never let a good crisis go to waste.”  In the chaos of the failed override may lie the seeds of truly meaningful change in our view of what a good public school system should and shouldn’t spend its resources on.

What other sources of private funding can Belmont tap and to what ends?

Perhaps, as one parent at the School Committee meeting suggested, parents could step up to fill the void left by salaried coaches: taking ownership of the athletics program directly and leaving the school administration to focus resources on, well, school.

If applied to freshman sports, why not JV and Varsity? Theater, government and other extracurriculars? This, of course, would de-professionalize big chunks of the instructional staff, and there are sure to be issues of quality and professionalism that will pop up, but more direct involvement of parents in the schools would, I imagine, also make them feel more like stakeholders and less like subjects of a (mostly) faceless bureaucracy? These are big, hairy questions and go directly against the status quo of U.S. public education over the last half century or so and, without both policy and structural changes, not much of importance is really going to be different in our public schools. But, once again, crises like the one we’re experiencing now force folks to think creatively and that, in the long term, often ends up being a good thing.

Northeastern: failed overrides hurt home values

Writing in the Globe, Bluestone and Gartsman talk about a simulation they ran on the impact on home values of a change in school spending due to a Prop. 2½ override. That’s a difficult data point to isolate. What the two researchers did was to look at data on housing values in 2005, then look at the change in housing values between 2005 and 2010, as compared to two measures of perceived school quality: school-wide SAT scores and per pupil expenditures.

What the researchers found was that municipalities with SAT scores and per pupil spending levels 20 percent higher than average experienced a 24 percent increase in nominal home value between 2005 and 2010. In contrast, those with SAT scores and per pupil spending 20 percent below average experienced a loss in home value of 11 percent.

Taking the town of Hull as an example, Bluestone noted that the town (like Belmont) recently rejected a small Prop 2 1/2 override ($1.9m) directed towards restoring AP classes at the high school and extracurricular activities. (There’s a warning here for Belmont about how far south things really can go, if you’re inclined to reason to yourself “oh, they’d never cut that!”) Hull, with average SAT scores below the average of communities they studied (961 compared with an average of 1047) and per pupil costs above the average ($11,491, some $1,500 higher than average), saw an increase in home values of 3.85 percent. The override, if passed in 2005, would have cost the average Hull tax payer  $2,530 over five years. Based on their analysis, however, the extra per pupil spending that a successful override would have generated would have correlated to an increase in home values of 6.5% – which translates into $9,970 in added value for the average Hull homeowner. In short: homeowners – even those without kids in the school – lost out on approximately $7,400 in added value on their home by voting down the override instead of passing it. Oops!!

There are issues here,clearly. Each town is different and there’s no guarantee that increasing school funding and programs will translate to increased property values. There are larger forces at play that might affect a local real estate market (the loss of a large employer, for example).

Also, the connection between per pupil spending and SAT scores is tenuous at best. School systems with much higher per pupil costs than Belmont (like Boston or Watertown) don’t come near towns like Belmont in average SAT scores, so its possible to get high performance without high per pupil expenditures. Belmont , most educators agree, exemplifies this.

However, if you believe that young families looking at comparable homes – one in a town that offers AP classes and sports, and one in a town that doesn’t won’t choose the former, you’re dreaming. And, if you believe (as I do) that, in the long term, starving your schools of resources to buy books, cutting class offerings and other support services (psychological, guidance, curriculum support), ceasing to offer accelerated instruction to advanced students and remedial instruction to struggling students will eventually bring down academic performance (which it will), then you should worry about the long term trends for the BPS and for Belmont home owners (like me!)

There’s a belief by many in town that Belmont doesn’t have to observe the laws of gravity -that we can short change our school system and still achieve stellar results.

In past years, that’s seemed to be the case and the exemplary performance of this year’s seniors has cemented that belief in the minds of many. But the effects of cuts are trailing and I predict that  we’ll soon start to see them in decreasing scores and standing for Belmont in the Bay State rankings, as well as the national rankings that Belmont has recently topped. If the study out of Northeastern is to be believed, homeowners who lament the needs of “freeloaders” (aka young families with school age children) and our professional educators may eventually realize that the price of being “right” is higher than they think.

The Brendan Grant 5K Walk/Run is this Sunday

Just a reminder to all the (many) runners (and sprinters) in town that the annual Brendan Grant Foundation “Brendan’s Home Run” 5K walk/run is happening this Sunday, father’s day. The race kicks off at the High School Field and festivities start at 9:30 am with the 5k Charity Walk. The race starts at 10:00 AM and there are 400m and 800m races for kids age 6-8 and 9-12 starting at 10:05 AM, right at the starting line.

There’s more information on the event Web site. Download a registration form here. Register today and the cost is $15. As of tomorrow, it goes up to $20. All proceeds benefit The Brendan Grant Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization) that honors the memory of Belmont’s own Brendan Peter Anthony Grant and is dedicated to enhancing youth development, representing the best in spirit of the child-parent relationship.

BCH override coverage fell short

How nice that the Belmont Citizen Herald has decided, in the wake of a critical override vote, to put its journalist hat back on and do hard reporting. An article online is now asking for “sources needed for override analysis.” That’s so funny, ’cause it seemed there were no shortage of unnamed sources just dying to talk a week ago, before the vote was taken, and there didn’t seem to be any problem with using their words then. Now that the vote is in the books, looks like its back to AP-standard reporting and folks with opinions are hard to come by. Go figure!

Let’s cut to the chase: I think Belmont’s new online paper, Patch, with editor and longtime Belmontonian Franklin Tucker, did a great job covering the election and the last minute dramatics, explaining the inaccuracies in the messages and doing the good work of getting officials and residents to go on record, explain what was going on and comment. It always helps to have boots on the ground where the story’s happening. The next big job is tracking down who is behind the messages, but I trust Franklin and Patch will be on that task now that the election is over.

“Political observers in Belmont suspect that override proponents are preparing to target Town Meeting members who did not sign pro-override promotional materials in the annual town election in 2011, meaning any fallout from Monday’s results could reverberate through town politics for at least another nine months.”

“Since we no longer have a Belmont blog, I occassionally write things on the site that would otherwise be blog posts. We’re putting everything on the site that would otherwise be a blog post. The only blog we now have is the Mitt blog. I’ve done this with foodie stuff, political notes, and other things. That’s what the election notes series basically is.”

I think Belmont was poorly served by its main paper and I, for one, will be discontinuing my subscription to the paper . Belmont deserves better.

In the end, I don’t want or need a paper that agrees with me or folks who think like me. I do need a paper that strives to sustain our community by fostering understanding and dialog based on facts, not invective, rumor and cheap political posturing. I need a paper that takes as its primary aim to be fair and balanced in its coverage, and that never sees fit to let its journalistic standards drop in the quest to score a political point or incite controversy. The Citizen Herald failed on all these points in its coverage of the override. Its time for a change.

Voters rejected a Prop 2 1/2 override - now come the cuts

On Monday I wrote about the importance of voting “YES” on the pending Prop 2 ½ override vote.  At the time I said that it was critical to pass the override, not only because it was needed to avoid drastic cuts in town services and education, but also because it marked a turning point in our town polietics — a willingness on the part of voters to have an honest discussion about the problems facing the town, the causes of its structural deficit and the best ways to address that deficit. OneBelmont.org, the YES group that I volunteered with was all about encouraging that conversation and bridging the polarized, personalized and intractable political divides. In the spirit of our recent community dialog, we wanted to have an honest dialog with parents and empty nesters, elected representitives and the voters they represent. We vetted our numbers carefully and worried endlessly about the accuracy of our message – worried that we might create inaccurate impressions about the uses or scope of the override.

So much for that idea! As we all know by now, voters rejected the Prop 2½ override by a solid margin. (Election results are posted here.) The vote came in a charged political environment with a strong anti-government and anti-incumbent mood among voters. It also came at the end of a hectic few days of shady and shadowy campaigning by as-yet-unnamed override opponents, who used used robot calling and push polling to spread misinformation about the purposes of the override to town voters. Nobody will ever know how effective the robocalls and push polling was — the override may have been doomed anyway. They surely didn’t help the YES cause and supporters were slow in responding to them – or unwilling to “go there.” So much for clean campaigning!

Clearly there was a lot of anger out there – and maybe the “YES” campaign misread it, or maybe there was nothing to be done. In an environment in which so many private sector employees are losing their jobs, maybe some folks will find it cathartic to fire some public sector employees, so their families can suffer, too. That’s a mean sentiment, but I don’t doubt it exists. As for the services those employees provide…we’ll all have to do without them.

What are those services? Well, school for one — Belmont High is being forced to eliminate or shorten its elective coursework, and, as Principal Mike Harvey notes, has eliminated 19 class sections in the last two years to try to live within budget constraints. As for the changes coming in 2010 and 2011, Mike Harvey lays them out in a letter addressed to parents. I’m reprinting it here.

(click more to read the letter)

Dear Parents,

I am writing to give you an update on our scheduling process for the 2010-2011 school year.  Last Monday, we were able to compile the course requests completed by students.  In our analysis of these numbers, it became apparent that there was not enough space in elective classes to schedule every student with the minimum of 6 full-year classes.  Unfortunately, there is no provision in the school budget for 2010-2011 to add sections to our schedule, so the solution is not as simple as adding more sections of high enrollment elective courses.

Our answer to this problem is to shorten the length of Ceramics 1, Drawing and Painting 1, Photography 1, Sculpture 1, History of Popular Music and Music Workshop from a full-year to a semester.  This will allow us to serve more students without adding sections, and schedule every student with at least 5 ½ classes.  While this is not an ideal situation, it is better than the alternative of scheduling students with only 5 courses.  Our guidance staff will be meeting with students this week who do not have a “complete” schedule to assist them in selecting their elective classes.

From an equity perspective, it is not right for a select number of students to have the opportunity to take 7 classes when many at the school will be limited to fewer than six.  As a result, students who indicated they would like to take a seventh class were asked last week to make a choice as to which elective they would prefer for their sixth course.

I definitely understand you will be frustrated and concerned about the potential effects these changes will have on your child’s education. I think it is a fair assessment to say that we at the high school are experiencing similar emotions as we wrestle with the realities of the 2010-2011 budget and the loss of nineteen class sections over two years.  We are beginning the process of building individual student schedules for next year and should have them emailed home prior to the end of July. Please understand that we are doing our best to meet the needs of all students in an equitable, consistent manner.

Sincerely,

Michael M. Harvey

Principal

The money in this override will preserve freshmen athletics at the high school, keep our elementary libraries open to students and allow us to at least stay on top of road and sidewalk maintenance, if not address the huge backlog of investment that will be needed to get them into shape. Visit the OneBelmont.org Web site for more information on how the override money will be used.

Beyond that, this override is really about Belmont being honest with itself — and in more ways than one. Its about the town facing up to the reality that the services that make this town a livable place cost money -and tend to cost more money over time. Its about facing up to the fact that we’ve been too willing to underfund those services over the years, and are now at a breaking point.

I say these things because, frankly, there’s been a lot of dishonesty and fact-mangling in the last few days – both in public and behind the scenes. As you may or may not know, anonymous individuals have been using robot calling to spread misinformation about the purposes of the override to town voters. Belmont’s new online paper, Patch, has excellent coverage of that – explaining the inaccuracies in the messages and doing the good work of getting officials to explain them and comment. The next big job is tracking down who is behind the messages, but I trust Patch will be on that task once the election is over.

I’ll have more to say on this after election day – but for now: get to the polls and VOTE YES to SAVE OUR SERVICES!!

I got up (again) and beat my favorite drum – parking revenue! What up? Where are the smart meters?  The answer, unsatisfying as it is, is that parking is tied up with the comprehensive plan and, thus, stuck in the slow lane…it’ll happen..eventually. Jeff Conti is working on it. When it happens, I’ll be there at the parking meter ribbon cutting.

Now we’re on to the schools budget – a $39.7m allocation. School Committee Chair Ann Rittenburg is talking about efforts to consolidate services in response to a question — structural reform? Reduce personnel costs. A question on virtual high school and distance learning. Many folks seem to look at this as a silver bullet – replace teachers, textbooks and school buildings with laptops and broadband. Ta da! Don’t count on it – good education is…alas…labor intensive. Our superintendent, Dr. Entwistle is gently reminding the audience that schooling starts in preschool and continues through 12th grade – young kids, developmentally, aren’t well suited to computer based learning.

Don Mercier just laid into the schools, teachers and misbehavin’ kids. A note: a solid majority of our public school teachers, like the new town clerk, also have advanced degrees in their area of expertise. I’ll also note that Belmont High was ranked among the nation’s best public high schools. Just sayin’!

We approve the town budget after some questions about consolidation and the shift of costs from the tax base to use fees. I ask about administrative cuts that are taking place quietly behind the scenes, but slowly eroding the quality of education that we’ll be able to offer – lots of department head and curriculum director positions unfilled,

Debating the Human Services budget now. Interesting question from the floor on the Warrant Committee’s programmatic analysis – programmatic analysis of the Council on Aging couldn’t be completed for lack of data on how it is spending its money. Hmmm…Rafi Manjikian is non-answering the question – “the report is the report” Ralph  Jones is saying  in essence “we hope to better understand how the COA is spending its budget” over the next year.

Culture and Recreation line item now being debated: $2.43m.