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03/30/2021 03:15 PMThe Board of Finance (BOF) effectively pushed the Board of Education (BOE) to use federal grant money to offset this year’s budget in a party line vote following emotional discussions over the last couple weeks, with Republicans pushing for immediate relief for taxpayers while Democrats argued money should be held against unknown expenses in the future.
The BOF removed $100,000 from the school budget in a 3-2 party line vote, with Republicans Jean Fitzgerald, Justin Murphy, and Filmore McPherson in favor and Democats Jude Friedman and John Picard against.
Though the action was technically to cut the BOE budget, effectively the BOF is asking the BOE to take $100,000 out of federal grant money received earlier this year to offset the decrease, with that money earmarked for COVID-related expenses.
The district is already slated to receive about $380,000 in an ESSER 2 grant, and is expecting more from the recently passed federal stimulus bill.
“I got back to the mill rate and the base, that’s my concern,” said Fitzgerald, the BOF chair. “The money’s there right now, the need is there right now. I think it’s fair.”
Democrats on both the BOE and BOF have focused on the unknowns of recovering from the pandemic, with an ongoing mental health crisis as well as learning loss from disruptions. Republicans have pointed out the grant money will go to COVID expenses in this year’s budget anyway, and referenced another grant through the federal American Rescue Plan currently estimated to pay out about $900,000 to the schools.
“We’re not talking about masks and hand cleansers, we’re talking about social workers and psychologists for these social and emotional impact[s],” said Friedmann. “We know that that’s going to need to be addressed in the schools.”
School Needs
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Craig Cooke said his administration team was still parsing through how to use the grants, both as an offset this year and through the next couple years.
The ESSER 2 grant actually was increased from about $344,000 due to an error in the state formula, according to Cooke.
The $100,000 offset will likely go to a handful of COVID-related items already approved in this year’s school budget, including an “intervention academy” over the summer to help acclimate students back to school and new technology.
The district also received a little less than $200,000 from the state that went toward adding “interactive boards”—the screens used by teachers to write on, show videos, or share other content with students—in every Madison classroom.
Cooke said he was aware that some community members on social media were worried or concerned that the $200,000 did not in fact pay for all those boards, covering Brown Intermediate School and Polson Middle School classrooms.
The schools budgeted an additional $102,000 for the rest of the district to receive those boards, which Cooke said will likely be fully installed for this next school year, though he cautioned that each building and room often encounter additional challenges based on electrical infrastructure and other issues.
But a majority of the grant money, both the remaining ESSER 2 money as well as whatever the district gets from the American Rescue Plan, will likely go to new positions, according to Cooke.
“We believe that it will take more than just one year to bring our students up to where they would have been otherwise, if the pandemic hadn’t happened, and that’s really the intention of the grant,” he said.
Two social workers to ensure every district building has one and additional classroom teachers and interventions at every K-3 school are parts of the preliminary discussions, Cooke said. Younger students have been more seriously affected by remote learning and other pandemic issues, Cooke said, and Madison is additionally trying to keep class sizes down as the district anticipates rising enrollment.
Republicans on the BOE have expressed concern that these new positions would end up being permanent and inflate the school budget even as grant money runs out. Cooke said there was nothing stopping the BOE from eliminating the new positions if they decided they were no longer needed.
“I would [imagine] at the end of the grant, us showing the [BOE] data from the positions and either making a case that they should be continued or having a plan to discontinue them. [It is] a decision we make really on a year-by-year basis,” he said.
Madison is one of only a handful of districts that has tested and assessed even its full-time remote learners, according to Cooke, and has been gathering data consistently to create plans for students who need both academic and social/emotional support as school staff anticipate a long road back to normalcy.
Another issue brought up by Democrats was the legality of using the money as an offset based on language in the grants. Cooke expressed confidence that his team would be able to put together something that would be acceptable within the parameters of the grants while acknowledging there are still plenty of unknowns.
“I would imagine that everything we’re talking about proposing would fit within the requirements of the grant,” Cooke said. “The intention of ESSER 2 was not to offset, the intention of the Rescue Plan—the language is still being, I think, worked out. The intention is to provide additional supports.”