UPDATE: Prior to publication, we requested clarification of two budget line descriptions from the Providence Public School Department. PPSD’s response was received only after this article was released. These clarifications are now included in the article.
Last November, after months of sniping among the parties, the City of Providence agreed to a court settlement with the RI Department of Education (RIDE) and the Providence Public School District (PPSD). Providence increased this year’s contribution to PPSD by $15 million. The city will also need to meet the higher contribution levels demanded by the state in future years, at least as long as RIDE continues to control the district under the terms of the Crowley Act,
Providence Mayor Bret Smiley says the increase will certainly trigger a tax rate jump of four percent or more next year. Yet, the $15 million is just three percent of the total $506M in funding from city, state and federal budgets that PPSD anticipated for the current school and fiscal year (July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025).
That’s a lot of money. Many people, including Mayor Smiley, believe it’s been poorly spent and that better financial management might somehow yield the better educational outcomes we’ve looked for in vain for so long.
Transformation isn’t cheap
But a close look at PPSD’s Budget Book for the 2024-25 school year tells a different story. There may well be scope to question how the district spends money at Central Office, as we have in other stories. And, the district should be far more transparent and responsive to questions about the budget.
Still, you won’t find the extra tens of millions of dollars needed to overcome the steep learning challenges facing our students by reshuffling the funds currently available to PPSD.
In fact, PPSD and RIDE have saved money the only way they really can – by shutting schools and shedding staff. That’s not the way to transform student learning and outcomes.
The hard fact is that public school funding from all sources is simply too low to meet the educational needs of students in Providence public schools. Administrators face impossible choices pitting one urgent need against another. Inflation, vital investments to improve poor student outcomes and court-ordered costs for multi-lingual education and special education drive costs up.
The city is now paying all it can afford. Meanwhile state funding falls far short of providing an adequate education to students in Rhode Island’s poorer urban communities. And under the new administration in Washington, essential federal funding targeted at the students with highest needs are very likely to be slashed.
While enrollment drops, costs rise
The Providence Public School District operates 35 schools serving about 18,400 students this school year. It serves 14 percent of all public school students, including charter school students, in Rhode Island. Total PPSD enrollment has fallen steadily since 2020 and is projected to fall even more, to fewer than 17,000 over the next five years, according to PPSD statements.
But fewer students don’t automatically lead to lower costs. To realize truly significant savings from lower enrollment, the district has to close an entire school building. The District has shut down four schools in the last two years, most recently and controversially, Gilbert Stuart Middle School and 360 Academy high school. The combined costs of those four schools in their last years of operation represented about $26 million in total annual spending that doesn’t appear in this budget.
However, the annual savings from those four school closures are more than offset by the $33.9 million in tuition that PPSD must send to their former students’ new charter schools as shown below.
Altogether, the district suffers a net loss of up to $18,840 for each student who shifts from a district to a charter school or other out-of-district school. Those dollars move immediately with the student, while it can take years to realize any savings from lower enrollment. The district will continue to bleed money as charter enrollment rises.
Higher student need also drives costs higher
The students in PPSD district schools include very high numbers of students with the greatest and costliest learning needs: multi-lingual learners (MLLS) and special education students. The district is under court orders to provide much higher levels of specific services to both groups.
PPSD says that 38.5% of its students are multilingual learners this year. The district has increased its investment in multilingual instruction training, coaching and certification for teachers, citing $5.9 million in additional MLL-related costs this year in its budget presentation.
The Budget Book also points to “a dramatic rise in student need and a nationwide shortage of special education teachers,” forcing the district to place more students in outside schools. The district says that tuition costs for special education outplacements have risen by $8.7 million since 2018, growing by 45% from last year to this year. To comply with federal court orders the district has had to add more special education classes to support pre-kindergarten and kindergarten special educations students. The district is offering a $10,000 salary bonus for teachers able to fill specific special needs teaching positions.
And then there’s everything else
While some expenses fluctuate from year to year, the long-term trend for PPSD, as at your house, has been higher core costs. We’ve looked at the five-year trend shown in the budget book to identify the major items driving higher expenditure at PPSD. There’s not a lot of discretionary spending here – nearly all of this represents bills that have to be paid. PPSD’s relatively modest investments in student services like translation and speech therapy are hard to argue with.
$28 million for “Tuition to Educational Service,” for special education out placements. (This cost increased by $11 million in the last year alone and by $13 million per year since 2020.)
$23 million for Custodial Services, about the same as budgeted last year, but sharply higher since 2020, when custodial costs were $15.1 million.
$22 million for Transportation, up from $16 million in 2020. By state law, the District must provide transportation for charter school and private school students as well as its own students.
$13 million for City Retirement, compared to $11 million in 2020.
$5.1 million for Electricity, up from $2 million in 2020 and up $1million from last year. This may be the result of energy credits that the city stopped providing to PPSD.
$2.9 million for Dental Insurance, $800,000 more than was spent in 2020.
$2 million for Other Technical Services covering critical computer systems such as bus routing software, the Parent Squared family communication platform and the Canvas LMS system for teachers and students, among other platforms. This cost has doubled since 2020 and is up $500,000 over last year.
$1.5 million for Interpreters and Translators. PPSD spent only $62,000 for translation and interpretation in 2020, but began making substantial annual increases from 2021 on. This expense was more than doubled from last year, adding $850,000 in new spending.
$1.1 million for Liability Insurance compared to $681,000 in 2020, a 61% increase.
$803,900 combined for diagnosticians, speech therapists, occupational therapists and psychologists, up $405,000 since 2020, although the number of personnel in each group has fluctuated higher and lower over the last four years.
Staff reductions are the only way PPSD can save lots of money
Last year, PPSD budgeted a total of $211M for salaries (including some “non-local” funds). For FY25, PPSD cut that to $203 in the budget and lopped off another $3M in budget modifications since the year began, to bring salaries down to just over $200M. Staff cuts have also reduced PPSD State Retirement expense to $19.8 million, down about $3 million from prior years.
There just isn’t much left for PPSD to cut that can transform its cost structure. A 50% cut in Library Books is a big dent in an important service, but it only saves about $25,000.
Staff cuts hit students hard
Under PPSD’s spending plan for the current year the entire PPSD workforce was to be cut by 290 positions, to 3,091 full-time equivalent positions, saving the $11 million mentioned above. Here’s what those cuts represent.
92 Teachers. This reflects a net reduction from 1,900 to 1,808. The district created 22 new teaching positions in the Office of Early Childhood, so the actual loss among existing teaching positions is probably more like 114. Closing Gilbert Stuart eliminated 31 teaching jobs. Closing 360 led to a net cut of seven teaching jobs. The Office of Special Populations (whose purpose and mission are not shared on PPSD’s website) was cut by 22 teaching positions.
9 School Administrators, 21 Teaching Assistants and 24 School Clerical positions. Removing support and administrative positions shifts more work to the remaining teachers and administrators and forces more highly-paid workers to spend more time on less important work.
36 school-based Behavioral Interventionists and 18 Social Workers. PPSD used much of the influx of federal “ESSER” funding to provide badly needed non-academic support to students. That funding ends this year. So does the social-emotional support for students.
115 “Other” positions. The largest group of eliminated jobs are lumped under this undescriptive category in the budget book. Many appear to be scattered across the 41 administrative offices and support departments listed in the budget’s Personnel section. The biggest loser was Human Resources, reduced from 35 to 26 positions. The Office of Equity was cut from 4 full time positions to two.
So, where does the money come from?
School funding throughout the US and here in Rhode Island has three main sources: municipal budgets, state aid to education and various federal entitlements and grants. Here’s how that looked in Rhode Island and here in Providence this year.
City funding was essentially flat until the court settlement of last November. We’ll need to bust through the statewide cap on property tax increases (4%) just to meet the obligations agreed to in the court settlement, according to Mayor Smiley.
Federal funding traditionally provided about $50 million a year prior to 2019. That swelled to a high of $247 million in federal funding for 2022 as the government injected huge sums of “ESSER” relief to help schools recover from the impacts of the COVID shutdown. But that temporary bounty ended last September 30.
The only thing we know right now about the future of federal funding is… Elon Musk.
State education funding fall short
That leaves state funding. In theory, Rhode Island’s state aid is based on an objective formula ensuring every child an adequate education. Rhode Island communities with higher student needs, such as lower family incomes and multilanguage instruction needs, get higher per-pupil allocations of state aid as well as some federal entitlements based on student need. State aid is also weighted to help communities with less capacity to raise enough property tax revenue to meet their educational burden.
However, state leaders naturally hate to tie their own hands by committing future funding to a formula that they can’t predict or alter. So, they left the definition of “adequacy” and what that might cost out of the formula. That means that the formula is applied to whatever pot of cash the General Assembly is working with in a particular year in competition with other essential state needs like, say, a soccer stadium in Pawtucket. Over the years, the General Assembly has also adopted a host of ad hoc exceptions and special provisions to shift the impact of the formula in response to lobbying from different cities and towns.
Last November, while releasing a new report on state education funding Michael DiBiase, President and CEO of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC), said the state’s annual aid is a “patchwork of funding allocations that appear to make little sense when comparing funding outcomes for communities that are similar in terms of student demographics and their relative ability to raise local revenue for their schools.”
If we really want change, we’ll have to find the money
Total state dollars to Providence schools have increased about 2.6% per year over the last decade, roughly equal to inflation. It’s never been enough to fund the district wide transformation RIDE promised us when it took control of our schools. Pretending otherwise has been RIDE’s biggest disservice to Providence schools and students.
The gap between the costs of an adequate education for all students and the amounts appropriated by political leaders can never be resolved by administrators at PPSD, regardless of whether the District is under state or city control. State government has established agreed-upon standards for educational outcomes than can never be met without agreement to also provide adequate funding.
Jonathan Howard is Co-founder of Cause & Effect, Inc., a consulting company that provides strategic planning facilitation, fund development planning and board strengthening to mission-driven organizations. He is a long- time resident of Providence.
