As Baltimore principals use newfound autonomy to craft budgets for their schools, some say they don't have enough money to cover all their expenses.
A new, decentralized funding structure for city schools seeks to rectify years of inequities while giving principals the authority to make decisions previously handled by the central office. That's good news for neighborhood high schools, which have been severely underfunded in the past and in some cases stand to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars. But small schools, many of them elementaries, will have to make do with less now that they're being funded based on the number of students they enroll.
The president of the city schools' administrators union called the new structure "deplorable." Jimmy Gittings, president of the Public School Administrators and Supervisors Association, said at a school board meeting last week that his union has surveyed 54 principals, and 64 percent of them reported that they'll have to cut staff.
City schools chief Andres Alonso questioned the validity of the survey. He said only 21 of 192 schools are receiving less money than they got this year, and those schools received a disproportionately high level of funding in the past. Their cuts will average $39,000 each and will not exceed 15 percent of a school's total budget.
System officials say the bigger issue may be that principals don't want to cut superfluous positions occupied by colleagues and friends. Tisha Edwards, special assistant to the CEO, gave the example of a school with 300 students and four assistant principals; the recommended staff ratio is one assistant principal per 300 students.
"What I'm finding is that principals oftentimes shy away from what are obvious cuts they should make because of connections to people," Edwards said. "They'll say, `I can't fund the staff that I had last year.' In some cases, that's true. In some cases, the staff we gave to schools was not appropriate, but it was the district's money so nobody cared."
The system's overall $1.2 billion budget, approved by the school board last month, closes a $50 million shortfall and absorbs $25 million in new expenses.
Though the budget redistributes $70 million from the central office to the schools, principals are absorbing many responsibilities and funding decisions that the central office used to handle, from overseeing janitorial services to determining class size. Alonso has said repeatedly at principals meetings that "this isn't Christmas." Principals can add an in-school suspension program, an after-school activity or an art class, but they can't do everything.
