FY16 budget synopsis

Our complete budget process, minutes, and documentation are easily available online at our Westford School Board page.  This will always be the source of official meeting agendas, minutes, documents, web streams, etc.  This blog is an additional means of diving deeper into the data and methods used for school board decision making.

Our Joint Meeting budget presentation is on Wednesday, January 7 (7:00 at the school common area).

For those not able to attend, a quick synopsis of our FY16 proposed budget:

• Proposed budget change:  -1.3%  (-$67,000)
• Projected homestead tax rate change:  +4.9% ($72 per $100k of assessed value)
• Projected income sensitivity tax rate change:  +9.35% ($26 per $10k of income)

Budget and Tax History

Yearly budgets are usually presented in relation to the previous year.  While the rate of change can be volatile year to year, overall longer trends can give a better picture of what a budget is really doing.

For example, big changes in a given line item from a previous year can get shadowed by a small change in the current year.  Looking at a multi-year history of that line item would tell a more complete story.

We like to include our budget and tax history in all budget conversations to be as transparent as possible.  The trends are clearly visible.  Below is our history, including the proposed budget and projected tax rates.  Tax rates for FY'16 are based on actual data for all variables except base tax rate (estimated to be +2 cents by the state) and the base education amount.  Those values will be available in the spring.  

Year over year, the budget change has averaged -0.33% for each of the last six years.  

Increases to the tax rates during recent years are directly attributed to our decreasing student population and the higher state base tax rates.  Local tax burden is determined not by our total spending, but instead our total spending per pupil.  As pupils decrease, spending per pupil for the remaining students increases.  

As the last of the baby boomer's children are graduating high school, we're seeing outgoing classes that are larger than incoming classes.  That has turned into a drop of -3.5% per year in students for us, driven by high school graduation.  Incoming elementary classes are stable or growing slightly.  

Based on population and birth rate predictions, we have several more years of decreasing preK-12 enrollment to prepare for.  

Proposed FY'16 staffing

A quick look at our budget will show you that preK-8 salary and benefits consume 50% of our total budget.  A further 30% goes to high school tuition.  How did the board approach staffing at our school for this upcoming budget?  Are we doing our job to be responsible to the taxpayers in Westford?

The Vermont State Education Quality Standards form the basis of our decision making around staffing.  Do we comply with the state standards in how we staff our school?  The words "must and "shall" show up often in relationship to staffing, leadership, curriculum, services, and more.  Guidelines are provided for the appropriate ratios of students to the staffing for particular services.

All staffing at Westford School complies with the Vermont State Education Quality Standards.  Each year, an audit of each position is performed to determine the following:

• Does the staffing of each position support projected student need for the coming year?
• Does the staffing of each position match the anticipated workload for the coming year?
• Is the staffing of each position appropriate to the Education Quality Standard recommendations for student to staffing ratios?
• Does the staffing support our School Action Plan?

Student need can change drastically as students move in and out of our system.  We attempt to be proactive in staffing to react to those changes.  School Action Plans and Education Quality Standards move less quickly, so changes can be more strategic.

The history of our total staffing (Full Time Equivalent positions, or FTE) is shown below.

Some observations of our staffing:

• Licensed staff change from FY11 to FY16 = -13.7%
• Support staff change from FY11 to FY16 = +4%
• Total staff change from FY11 to FY16 = -7.4%

The downward trend in staffing tracks with our decrease in students.  Support staff positions are traditionally less costly than licensed staff, so shifting appropriate workloads to staff positions can result in cost savings. 

What does the FY16 student to staffing comparison look like?

*Teachers include all instructional educators (classroom teachers, special educators, reading specialist, math specialist)

**Staff includes all employees (licensed teachers, librarian, nurse, counselors, SLP, ETIS, IT, custodial, maintenance, clerical, paras, etc.)

Westford School is well above the state average in all three metrics.  We could handle more students within our current classrooms, so these numbers could get better with the same staffing if student populations increase.  

Recently, the Secretary of Education presented to all state school boards that if they were to increase the state average student to staff ratio of 4.67 to 5.0, it would result in annual savings of $74 million dollars to state taxpayers.  That equates to about 7 cents on the tax rate!  Westford has exceeded that challenge by an additional 10%.  

Data driven comparisons

Each year, the Department of Education publishes detailed reports on all schools in Vermont.  A great deal of data is contained within, and these are useful tools to help compare our school district to others to see how we are doing on important metrics.

Visit http://education.vermont.gov/data for a full list of reports.

So how did we do compared to the averages and other area schools?  Let's look at two of the most asked about topics during budget time; staffing and taxes.  (All data presented is pulled directly from the above website.)

The metric that has the largest potential impact to our budget is the student to teacher ratio.  Right-sized staffing is critical to keeping the ratio both constant and appropriate.  The average student to teacher ratio in Vermont is 9.9.  The chart below shows Westford within the cohort of schools with greater than 200 students.  Believe it or not, Westford is not considered a small school in Vermont!

Westford's student to teacher ratio is 11.88, which is the highest ratio for K-8 schools with 200 to 400 students.  This is achieved with one classroom teacher per grade level.  Note that all the schools with a higher ratio have at least two times the students we have, thus more flexibility in how to deploy teachers and classroom configurations.  The FY'14 student to teacher ratio was calculated to be 12.1.

How this ultimately affects our town is through budgeting and the resulting tax rate.  Below is a chart sorted by Actual Homestead Tax Rates for all the towns in our general area.

Westford's actual tax rate compares favorably to other towns in the area.  These rates are adjusted by the Common Level of Appraisal, so they provide a fairly equalized look at how town to town property taxes stack up against each other.

Data for FY'14 and FY'15 has been compiled manually from the Department of Taxes,  http://www.state.vt.us/tax/pvredtaxrates.shtml and is included below.  Our continued loss of equalized pupils is evident as the spending per pupil number grows.