The CAG report highlights multiple important issues, some “hard”, such as the financial picture and some “soft”.  Key among the soft is a recognition that there has been a loss of trust in the administration and school committee due to lack of transparency and inconsistency in both message and outcomes.  I believe that the current school committee has slowly begun to understand this issue, but one of the fundamental tenets of my campaign is that this trust must be restored before we will be able to make substantive forward progress on the urgent challenges facing our schools, thus this must be made an absolute priority.  I am proud to note many similarities between the CAG recommendations and my own thoughts that I have previously written and spoken about.

Specific suggestions that the CAG makes to help restore this trust are:

o Clearly differentiate between the essential vs the desirable in our goals and mission as well as our programs and services.  Document the relationship between fixed costs and programs.  The rationale behind tradeoffs made year to year in the current budgeting practice can appear opaque to the general public.  We need clearer and more concrete prioritization.  A key element in this is also to establish metrics to measure our effectiveness over time at achieving our essential and desirable objectives.


o Program area budgeting where the budget is presented not only by type of cost (salary, etc.) and by general cost center (elementary school, middle school, etc.) but aligned with overall programs across the system against program areas such as mathematics, arts and music, etc.  This will aid in the evaluation of each program area’s cost / benefit analysis.  This will required the allocation of fixed costs equitably across program areas.  Note that the intent is not to identify items to eliminate, but rather to improve transparency of how resources are allocated across the broad range of educational goals.


o An open and honest discussion of the METCO program and its objectives and financing.  There is great confusion about this program within the community at large.  Is it funded by the state?  Are we paying for it?  How much does it cost?  The CAG report goes into depth in analyzing the cost and financing of Metco from two perspectives (incremental and full cost).  Which is right?  The truth probably lies somewhere between the two.  The key here is to have the discussion.  (For the record, I am a supporter of the METCO program.  I attended NPS and experienced what our participation means from the student’s perspective.  I believe that the social benefits outweigh the costs, but I too have many unanswered questions about the program, how it is financed, what it truly costs us and how we measure the results).
 

Many other suggestions that the CAG has made will also contribute to restoring trust, but those items resonated the most for me.