CMS defines key school budget terms

With CMS studying an array of cutbacks to plug a budget gap of as much as $100 million, many parents and civic leaders are paying close attention to the unfolding budget deliberations. The school board is slated to talk budget issues at its meeting tomorrow evening, weather permitting. CMS' recent release of per-pupil, per-school expenditures generated a lot of interest last week. The list included expenditures for "school activity fund," a term that has left a lot of readers scratching their heads. What, they asked, does that exactly include? Superintendent Peter Gorman late last week e-mailed school board members a document that explains that term, along with weighted student staffing and other budget items that figure to loom large during this spring's budget discussions.

Perhaps more importantly, the document Gorman gave the school board also provides an overview of the various factors that can influence per-pupil spending. Considering the intensity of the debates that always erupt surrounding questions of equity (and the fact that some of the poorest schools receive twice as much as some of the wealthier schools), those factors are worth studying. You can take a look here.

Eric Frazier

What about the lottery money?

As school budget talks crank up, so does a chorus of questions about where the money from the N.C. Education Lottery goes.

N.C. Department of Public Instruction has posted a brief explainer here.

For county-by-county breakdowns, go to the Lottery Commission's site (click Beneficiary Brochures for details).
-- ADH

Geek alert: CMS per-pupil spending

CMS has posted its latest chart of calculations on per-pupil spending by school, as board members prepare to start figuring out where to slash tens of millions of dollars for the coming year.

Eric Frazier, efrazier@charlotteobserver.com, is doing the story on the numbers. Since we're still working getting him hooked up on this blog, I'll share the good and bad news for those who like to do their own number-crunching.

The good: CMS is sharing great info about spending, academic performance, student/teacher ratios, teacher experience, poverty and race. And they've included enough detail that you can see how the staff did their calculations.

The bad: It's nearly impossible to read on the PDF files they've posted. (If you know any tips for making that work better, please share.)

The good: The public information office sent us an Excel version and is checking out the N.C. Department of Public Instruction's system that lets users download data in Excel.

Eric and I can pass along the Excel version with those of you who want to study the chart. Contact Eric if you want to discuss issues for the story; if you just want the geek sheet, I can help at ahelms@charlotteobserver.com

CMS's Band-Aid solution -- literally

Kimberly Helms, a Northwest School of the Arts parent, posted an interesting comment on yesterday's story about budget cuts in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. She noted that the school nurse had recently passed along a list of items she'd like parents to donate for the school health room: Kleenex, ginger ale, crackers, bottled water, cough drops, sanitary napkins, and hard candy for diabetic students.

"I nearly cried when I read it," Helms wrote. "It's a shame a school nurse can't even give a kid a tissue or a drink to comfort them."

School nurses have long turned to parents and other partners to stock the health rooms, says Maria Bonaiuto, school health director with the Mecklenburg Counth Health Department. Except for the sanitary napkins -- CMS recently stopped supplying those -- the wish list isn't related to budget cuts, she says.

In fact, Bonaiuto gives credit to CMS school health specialist Nancy Langenfeld and recently-retired Assistant Superintendent Barb Pellin for finding "a couple thousand dollars" in shrinking budgets to make sure the neediest schools have basic health supplies.

At some high-poverty schools that don't have PTAs raising money, "there were times when literally there was not a Band-Aid in the house," Bonaiuto said. Now there's a central supply of bandages, thermometers and other essentials. But yes, she says, nurses continue to ask for help supplying such things as soft drinks to settle stomachs and snacks to help a hungry student get through the day. (Bonaiuto isn't sure cough drops should be on the wish list -- if students can go to the nurse for a cough drop, "they'll come get it like candy.")

Bonaiuto notes that plenty of people are pitching in to make sure needy schools aren't shortchanged. Some strong PTAs team up to support a high-poverty school. Other schools have faith, business or community partners who help with extras for health rooms. And several parish nurses -- nurses hired by houses of worship to serve a community -- work with school nurses to make sure kids get what they need.

"Lots of people in this community reach out," Bonaiuto says. "It's nice."

I caught up with Helms (not related to me) by cell phone and filled her in on the various efforts to stock school health rooms. She was glad to hear there are no new cuts and glad to hear CMS is doing something to fill gaps. Her next stop? Going to the store for some ginger ale to send in with her daughter.
--ADH

Budget cuts: Wild ride ahead

It looks like we're going to get three extra months of budget uproar, now that Superintendent Peter Gorman says he's going to release a rough draft of a 2011-12 budget plan for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools on Tuesday. He'll release his suggestions for making about $100 million in cuts and ask the board to vote on some time-sensitive biggies on Jan. 25.

It doesn't take a Ouija board to predict that hundreds of jobs will be on the block. Cutbacks in busing, Bright Beginnings prekindergarten and additional teachers to help children of poverty are likely to be on the vote-in-January list, with additional layoffs looming into spring and summer.

Another easy prediction: Critics will accuse Gorman and the board of trying to scare people into lobbying state legislators and county commissioners for more money. There's no doubt that the prospect of firing teachers and cutting popular programs arouses people more than general budget forecasts, no matter how dire. And of course CMS leaders want support for the most money they can get in a dismal year.

But they also make a pretty convincing case for early decisions. Remember last May, when the school board voted to yank neighborhood busing for thousands of magnet students? Families were understandably outraged that CMS was reneging on promises made during the  January application period.

Early decisions are creating a clash with board Chair Eric Davis's vow to get extensive public engagement. With votes looming in less than three weeks, there won't be time for a lot of public forums and special meetings on some items, Gorman says. However, he noted that he's gotten an anonymous donation to cover the cost (about $8,000) of taping, airing and webstreaming four special budget meetings later in the year.

The rush also poses challenges in getting details posted in advance. Democracy is best served when board members, reporters and interested members of the public all have access to complicated material and proposals before a meeting begins. If people watch board members debating mystery handouts, they can't really follow the discussion.

CMS officials aren't arguing in theory, but they say advance release isn't realistic when so much budget information is being cranked out so quickly.

So ... expect Tuesday's agenda and some supporting material, including a breakdown of last year's per-pupil spending at each school, to be posted here tomorrow. But documents connected with Gorman's budget-cutting plans won't be available until the meeting starts, he says. Spokeswoman LaTarzja Henry says she's working on getting them posted online at the same agenda link as quickly as possible, so anyone who's following from home or brings a laptop to the meeting can read along.

P.S. I'm happy to report that Eric Frazier is officially joining me in education coverage, at least for the duration of the budget crisis. He'll be joining me on this blog as well.

One-percent solutions

"There's not one big thing. There are one hundred one-percent solutions."

That quote, from a leader of a charter chain that's been successful with urban students, has been sticking in my mind as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools goes into the next round of budget-slicing.

It's from "A Chance to Make History" by Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America. She lays out a lot of thought-provoking ideas about what it takes to break the cycle of failure for low-income and minority students. Among them: The best predictor of teacher success may be such personal characteristics as leadership, resilience and high energy, rather than any combination of credentials and skills. One charter chain has given their teachers a battery of psychological tests, "searching for the disposition of teachers who are getting the best results," she writes.

One of her central arguments is to stop searching for "silver bullets and silver scapegoats," instead acknowledging that it takes a lot of small, difficult changes to make a big difference.

At first blush, that clashes with the sense of urgency that she and many others bring to the quest for better urban schools. "Incremental change" is almost a dirty word in such circles. And Kopp is not counseling anyone to be content with a smidgen of improvement each year, in hopes that kids will be doing fine by, say, 2030.

She does warn that no one approach -- not small schools or small classes, not more money or more technology, not charters or vouchers, not even Teach For America -- can turn the tide.

"The achievement gap in America is massive," Kopp writes. "If we think in terms of mapping student performance on a one hundred-point scale, the black-white achievement gap appears to be about thirty-five points. Meanwhile, virtually all of the strategies mentioned in this chapter, even if we accept only the most optimistic research about their impact, might close the gap by only one, two or three points."

That's sobering. New efforts and reform strategies tend to be sold as The Big Answer -- perhaps understandably, since their creators are trying to rally taxpayers, politicians and/or grant makers to invest millions of dollars. And yes, reporters also tend to be more captivated by silver bullets than one-percent solutions.

I'm remembering how back in the 1990s, CMS rolled out Bright Beginnings prekindergarten as something close to an inoculation against failure. Keep the kids from falling behind in kindergarten, the pitch went, and they'd sail through school on par with more advantaged peers, graduating from high school and going on to lives free of poverty and prison.

Now the first Bright Beginnings tots are in high school and hard data is scarce. But it's clear that the pre-K is more like a year of being fed -- it's far better than malnutrition, but it doesn't mean much if many more years of healthy meals don't follow. It may be more than one percent of the solution, but it's far from 100.

Starting this month, Bright Beginnings and a whole lot of other programs face scrutiny and possible cuts. It's sort of like a high-stakes game of Jenga. CMS officials say they've already pulled out all the easy blocks. Now they've got to slide out a lot more pieces -- and hope the tower doesn't collapse.

Seeing red on Tuesday

If you see a lot of red clothes in schools tomorrow, that's probably because it's "Wear Red for Public Ed" day. Local educators are putting the word out on Facebook.

The sponsor is a group called Save Our Schools Million Teacher March.

I can't tell much about this group from the Web site, but founder Chris Janotta is an education blogger and language arts teacher in suburban Chicago. Plans for a 2010 Million Teacher March apparently fell through, but there's a move afoot to try again this year, along with smaller, easier efforts to rally support for teachers who feel besieged by budget cuts and reform efforts.

I know -- this isn't the meatiest blog post to kick off the new year. Trust me, there will be plenty of news bubbling up this month, as the state legislature and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools board delve into 2011 budgets. Plus Mecklenburg Ministries and the Levine Museum of the New South have big pushes coming to support and discuss public education in Charlotte.

Meanwhile, I hope everyone enjoyed a little holiday breather. When I wasn't covering airport news (during the holidays, everyone's a general assignment reporter), I used the slow time to read an advance copy of Wendy Kopp's "A Chance to Make History" (more about that to come).

Next up on my reading list: Gene Maeroff's "School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy." Not only did he do some of his research in Charlotte, he's a former education reporter who is now president of the school board in Edison, N.J. Now that's a journey I'm curious to learn about!