Presented last Wednesday, the proposed budget for FY2024 has created – among many other things – a new topic for conversation. While the verdict of the override was released March 14, it’s the proposed new budget that, when implemented, will determine where and how funding is allocated as well as what school programs will be cut and which will be funded.
For instance, drama, athletic, and other extracurricular programs will all be decreased by about 10%. Fiscal maneuvering across the board is to be expected with a $4.9 million budget shortfall– $4.9 million despite the $1.4 million in one-time funding received from the city.
It’s all very unfortunate, according to Alissa Kraus, student representative in Newton North’s Student Faculty Administration. “As a student, I wish that the rest of the override had passed,” she said. “[The deficit] will affect me and my education, and although the effects of the override failing aren’t entirely known yet, it will clearly have an impact on a lot of students at North and the whole school community.”
Quantified, that’s about $9 million of impacts – in theory, anyway. Had the chief provision of the override passed, NPS likely could have delayed any deficits into carryforward for future years. And, necessary as circuit breaker measures are, any kind of one-time funding “creates a structural budget deficit that is unsustainable over time,” according to the proposed budget report.
The results of the failed override, says NNHS Junior Yuhan Wu, make for an unexceptional quality of education and leave no good alternatives. “As a student, the reductions especially cause a decrease in the effectiveness of our educational system.” He continued, “the override just seemed pretty unlikely to pass to begin with, which was a big problem.”
Yet besides overrides and circuit breaker tax hikes, there just isn’t any realistic way of funding an underfunded system. “There’s donation, I suppose, but I doubt how well that would work.” Taxation on the other hand, “puts homeowners and teachers, who are supposed to be allies, in confrontation.”
Still, if asked to pick a side, Wu reluctantly agreed that he would have supported the override vote. “Our high schools aren’t too big to fail, but they do make up a gigantic school system and so are hard to manage. It’s a difficult problem, and emergency funding is necessary sometimes.”
Overall, Wu compared the current situation to “solving a math equation with a hundred variables,” which, somehow, fits.
And unfortunately, so does the funding problem. According to NNHS Student Faculty Administration student representative Alex Gleason, potential deficits have been a concern for quite some time. “Just a few years back, Newton North had to cut 4 staff members due to rising costs, but with our high taxes and huge property values I really just don’t understand where all the money went.”
Concerningly, the 4 staff members were cut right before North received a huge influx of new students. “The new students that have enrolled need roughly 4 additional staff members, so even before the override failed, North was effectively 8 staff members short of what is ideal.”
With the looming budget deficits, more cuts are forecasted for the near future. In general, high school staff numbers will decrease by 2.2 FTE under the FY24 budget (meaning about 4 more staff will be cut) and with them, a number of courses will be reduced or canceled entirely. The Career and Technical area of education will see particular decreases, creating problems for people like Thomas Donovan, an NSHS student and Auto major.
“The cuts are important to me because I take auto. The kind of stuff that I do will likely be scaled down, which is obviously not good.” The bigger class sizes don’t really worry him, though. They might other people, or anyone that doesn’t want to see a Phys Ed class with about 50 in attendance.
AP courses will feel the squeeze as well. As Alex Gleason puts it, “had the override passed, AP Stats would likely have had more classes and therefore been available to all Juniors. Since it did not, some juniors might get AP Stats but others might not. Overall, most of the negative effects will be shown in elective classes.”
Still, it’s not terrible – NNHS students like Yuhan Wu, learning from today’s funding problems, just may find the future’s solution. “We could reduce the deficit to supply and demand. We could either increase the supply of money, or decrease the demand for it, maybe with restrictions of some kind.”
Granted, he says, he’s not a politician.
Andrey Sarkanich is a sophomore at Newton North High School.
