The Committee of the Whole discussed findings from the Community Dialogue Working Group, established after the Newton Teacher’s Strike, to develop specific recommendations on how the City Council can help our community better understand its role and City finances.
The working group held community meetings and an online survey with 350+ responses. They found five themes and made five final recommendations:
Five Themes
COMMUNICATIONS + TRANSPARENCY
- The City Council, School Committee and Mayor need to be more proactive and communicative. City officials need to share facts and opinions, making it clear which is which. Communciations need to be clear as to WHO is sending the message.
- The communications coming from the city were hostile toward teachers and NTA in general. The tone was received as offensive and off-putting.
- Respondents wondered: what do the terms being discussed mean? (Including terms such as free cash, overlay surplus, operating override v. debt-exclusion override)
- There is a lack of ‘open data’ in Newton (reference to the Cambridge Open Data project); there should be a ‘self-service’ appraoch to data / data accessibility in Newton.
COOPERATION & PARTNERSHIP
- City Council, School Committee, Mayor’s office + departments need to find a better way to work together – to understand what each other is doing and the challenges they face. Working together is the only way to solve the problems we face (e.g., possible future overrides)
- Can there be a ‘single source’ of actual truth available to the public when things like this happen? Or even on an ongoing basis?
- Some feel discomfort with Newton’s ‘strong mayor’ form of government . (i.e., Mayor has too much say over the budget / funding decisions. Residents should have more input .)
KNOWLEDGE BASE
- It is unclear how central functions of the city work – for example, the budget and related processes. Where does Newton’s revenue come from, how is it allocated? Can we create different views of the budget to make it easier to follow along? Make it more visual?
- Significant misunderstanding around which ‘branch’ of the city government is in charge of what [e,g., roles and responsibilities]. Does the Mayor really have total control over the budget? Why is the Mayor part of the School Committee? Who or what is the Pension Board?
- Regardless of who or where a respondent’s information was gathered from, everyone else’s motivations were questioned. Therefore, they were either ‘lying’ or publishing ‘misinformation’; much of the available information was seen as useless, biased, or false.
SCHOOLS & STUDENTS
- Concerns about NPS – it’s in decline, it’s not a desirable place to work, it is in crisis (either it IS, or the perception is that it is). Need to address residual impact of pandemic, and the resulting shut down.
- We lost our focus on kids – their experience, their challenges. Many of these concerns focused futher on students with IEPs, and the legal implications of not fulfilling those plans.
“IN THE CRISIS” OPEN QUESTIONS
- The city took too long to negotiate in good faith, and it should not have required that much time.
- The broader ‘stage’ for a teacher’s strike has many unknowns; what were the NTA and MTA roles and goals? The courts? Role of the Mediator? What were the fines for and who received these funds?
- Why did the teachers have to strike – as in why not continue working while negotiations were in parallel, ongoing?
- The information published during the strike ‘from the negotiating room’ was overly and obviously biased.
- All parties involved were both praised and criticized; gratitude was expressed to all parties by various respondents and many concerns raised about leaders, individuals, and entities / organizations
Five Recommendations
1: The Work Continues: The city council will monitor and validate successful outcomes, determine if efforts are accomplishing their goals, if modifications are warranted. The Community Dialogue Working Group (CDWG) continues to lead the projects.
2: Public Engagement: Increase public engagement through informal “Office Hours” style sessions staffed by [some small # of] members of the City Council, and perhaps other city personnel, elected officials as well. These sessions would be intended as a forum for discussion, sharing ideas, and for residents to be heard directly. Many councilors already hold office hours or similar opportunities, this is not to replace that, but to have more group opportunities and to perhaps reach a wider group of residents. Some of these sessions could focus on certain themes and some would be open discussions.
3: Collaboration: The City Council (CC) and School Committee (SC) need to work more closely together to understand the challenges and opportunities facing both groups and share information on what’s going on in the schools. Working together, both groups would create a cadence, agenda for combined meetings on a regular basis. As the Program & Services committee has responsiblilty for NPS-related topics, this would fall to their members to coordinate. The start of this conversation should happen in Q2, 2024.
4: Transparency: Ensure that the city budget, including revenue and expenditures, has a clear, approachable summary that facilitates understanding and accessibility. Engage the Comptroller and Finance Committee to assist with creating a small number of visuals that conveys the most important aspects of the city’s budget. This work would also include a ‘glossary of terms’.
5: Communication: The City Council should facilitate clearer communications with the public. This should include something along the lines of an FAQ, wherein we would compile a list of these questions we hear most often, create a series of ‘shortcuts’ to this information (think: 311, calendar of events, upcoming road projects) on our section of the City website. Also consider re-establishing our newsletter, and potentially creating additional resources as needed.
Councilors expressed concerns about the amount of time and expense the recommendations require, noting that many members of the Council have outside employment. The session adjourned with a unanimous decision to further deliberate on proposed recommendations (21-0, Councilors Albright and Lucas Not Voting)
See Report and watch NewTV video.