East Baton Rouge Parish School Board members on Thursday took a deep examination of Superintendent Sito Narcisse’s spending plans for next year, quizzing him and other staff on staff changes, new positions in bilingual education and cutbacks in student transportation.
The fallout from the forced reassignment of more than 230 school employees in early May continues. A handful of local activists held a press conference before Thursday night’s board meeting to apply new pressure to the board to reverse Narcisse’s moves.
“It’s important that we use our voice and we use our power to let the School Board know we are not in support of any of these changes,” said Kaitlyn Joshua, a community organizer with the New Orleans-based Power Coalition for Equity & Justice.
Jamie Harrison, a community activist who made an unsuccessful run for Metro Council in 2020, questioned Narcisse’s justification for the staffing changes. Narcisse had said the changes will ensure more high-quality teachers in struggling schools. Harrison, however, noted that many of the schools losing the most staff are already struggling schools.
“In actuality, this entire module hurts those students,” Harrison said.
The School Board debated two budgets, a $515.5 million general operating budget and a $141.7 million "special revenues” budget covering 46 special funds created for specific purposes from paying for musical instruments to school construction.
The budgets are scheduled for final approval on June 16 and would take effect July 1, the start of the 2022-23 fiscal year. It’s the second set of budgets Narcisse has presided over since he took over the school district in January 2021, but it’s the first that fully reflects his spending priorities.
The staffing changes, known as impact reassignments, sparked renewed discussion Thursday, though it wasn’t as rancorous as the May 19 meeting when the board debated the issue for more than four hours.
The reassignments are part of an annual process of moving staff from schools with enrollment declines to schools with more students. But more staff working at more schools were affected this year because of a complicated new staffing formula Narcisse instituted. The formula forced schools to free up two to five positions by requiring schools to add new positions, including a literary and math coach at every school.
Storm Matthews, an English teacher at Sherwood Middle School, objected to moving employees by force and not starting first with the 634 employees, including 547 teachers, who had already requested transfers to other schools. She also noted that, unlike the teachers on the impact lists, teachers seeking voluntary transfers have to have a satisfactory job evaluation.
“During a teacher shortage, instead of incentivizing our teachers to stay in the district, we opted to shuffle them around and show very little appreciation for their hard work and commitment to our students,” Matthews said.
The two budgets discussed Thursday are not the whole fiscal picture. They don’t include federal COVID disaster relief funding for the school system. Last month, school officials said the district had spent almost $100 million of about $223 million of federal funding allocated by the federal government.
Board member Dawn Collins questioned Chief Financial Officer Kelly Lopez on why the special federal funding is absent from the special revenue budget, even though it was included in that document last year. Lopez responded that they left out those federal funds because the board already approved that budget. Collins, however, was not persuaded, saying other budgets in the special revenue document had been approved previously as well.
The general operating, or General Fund, budget is the largest budget of the school district and it has grown substantially over the past year. Revenue has grown by 7.1% thanks to a windfall in sales tax collections as well as increases in state and federal education funding. The school system’s financial reserves have increased as well, growing from $44.9 million in 2022-21 to an estimated $54.6 million by the end of the 2022-23 fiscal year.
Spending, however, has grown at an even faster rate under Narcisse, almost 11% in the past year, increasing from $464.6 million in 2020-21 to an estimated $515.5 million in 2022-23. That’s still slightly less than the expected revenue of $517.6 million.
Lopez said she may be understating likely revenue, particularly from sales tax, which has grown significantly over the past year. But she said she is using conservative sales tax revenue projections developed by LSU economist James Richardson.
"I’m going to go with that estimate and hope that we will receive more,” Lopez said.
The general operating budget alone shows 225 additional positions over the time span. And that doesn’t count a number of new positions paid for with federal COVID money.
Central Office also continues to grow. Spending on general administration, the pot that pays for the bulk of Narcisse’s cabinet, has grown from $10.9 million in fiscal year 2019-20, the year before Narcisse arrived, to an estimated $13.7 million in 2022-23. That’s a 25% increase. The number of general administration positions has increased from 24 to 32.
The budget makes other big changes in a variety of areas.
For instance, it calls for the hiring of 40 new bilingual education teachers, costing about $2.7 million more. Students who are learning English as a second language is a growing segment of the student population and they tend to underperform on standardized tests even compared to similar children in other districts.
The school system, however, plans to cut back in other areas.
Student transportation spending is set to decline from $32.2 million to $30.4 million, a 5.6% reduction. The school system argues it can achieve these savings through more efficient bus routes made possible by new transportation software the system is looking to buy and the hiring of a fourth routing specialist.
Board member Jill Dyason was dubious. She noted that bus service was often poor this past year with buses not showing up at all and then no trail bus coming afterward, leaving kids stranded and their parents scrambling to bring their children to school.
“I'm just trying to figure out how we can reduce by nine (bus drivers) and still have quality,” Dyason said.