total time: 9.95 minutes
total words: 1679
[Graham]: As importantly, thank you everybody else who's here because you all are the reason why we do the work that we do. This is a historic moment for Medford Public Schools, and it's one that we have to soak in and really take advantage of. When I ran for office in 2019, which is 100 dog years ago, it seemed like part of the reason I ran is because I would go to school committee meetings, and the hard questions about what do we need and don't have, those questions never were asked, and they certainly weren't answered. That is one of the many reasons why I ran. Once I got elected and I started on the school committee, we started having budget meetings. The first thing I said was, what is the process? How does this work? How do we know what we need versus how do we know how much we have? There were a lot of blank stares in the room. There were a lot of people who were like, what do you mean? I said, how do we know what we need? does it just always magically match every year? And everyone sort of said, yeah, it does. And I said, okay, well, if you talk to the community, they talk a lot about what we don't have. So this can't be true. So from that moment on, I've been on a quest to be more intentional about describing the budget in terms of what we would need. That year in the middle of the onset of COVID, we started simple and we just said to the department heads, what are three to five things you could do that would improve student outcomes? How much did the list cost? Anybody, any guesses? You know, any guesses? not that much, but $10 million, a cool $10 million without a lot of strategic thinking, without a lot of time to really think deeply about that question because they were also in the middle of shutting down school and trying to figure out this virtual learning thing, right? So a cool $10 million just like that. Ever since then, we have taken more strategic approaches to get to that same question, and it changes a little bit every year how we do it. But the answer is always about $10 million. The answer of what we need and don't have is always significant. And it's changed, right? So we aren't talking about needing Chromebooks for every student anymore. We were in 2020. That's changed. Now we're talking about we need money to replace those Chromebooks that we bought in 2020 because it's not an option to not have technology anymore. So as I think about this work that we're doing, I'm excited to let people be free to really think about what could improve student outcomes. What do we need that we don't have? And this moment is a huge start. If you were paying attention this spring, you know that the budget was bad. It was dire. The MPS administration was asked to lay out sort of what would it take to meet the city's available allocation and they laid out a devastating list of cuts and we were still 2.7 million dollars away from that number. So when you talk about 2.7 million more dollars, nothing is safe. Class size, athletics, extracurriculars, buses, the arts, the list goes on. 2.7 million dollars is a big, big number. And that's in addition to all of the other cuts that they could lay out for us. I'm super grateful that my fellow finance task force members voiced their unwavering support when I said, we can't live through this. This is too deep for Medford Public Schools. And we were able to work with the task force. I'm grateful to every city department that ratcheted back what they wanted out of the budget so that the situation at Medford Public Schools could be a little less bad. And that's what we're talking about. It was less bad. I'm also grateful for one-time funds because that all allowed us to do some things in a stopgap way. We were able to save two literacy interventionists, four department heads, three behavior specialists, one nurse, two elementary school teachers, and a facilities maintenance budget that was a little less anemic than in years past. So that's what we did with one-time funds, but that's one time. That means that all of those things are on the chopping block again next year. There's no more one-time funds to fill this void. So let's talk about November because that's actually a more fun thing to talk about. We're going to do two things. The first thing we're going to do is stabilize the budget. What does that mean? We're going to stop the potential of that hole that we've created with one-time funds. We're going to close that gap and we're going to close it for good. Those critical staff members I just talked about, we're going to put them in a position where they can continue to support our students the way that they need to. The stabilizing money will also fund our technology replacement budget. It's 2024, and it's not an option to not have technology anymore. It will also allow us to restore an administrative assistant at the McGlynn School, where we have one administrative assistant managing two school buildings and supporting two principals. It's a lot. And she's going to do it, and she's going to be amazing. But that is a stopgap situation. So we're looking forward to being able to do something to address that. And it will also this stabilization money will ensure that we never have to find out what that $2.7 million would actually look like. So that's one thing we're going to do. We're going to stabilize the budget. We're going to stop doing this one time thing where we don't have enough to even get by. yay but as importantly we're going to invest in the future so we're going to do more than just run in place we are going to do more and the list of possibilities is long and you probably all have your own list of what you think is possible or what you think would be useful and so I brought my list just to give you a flavor of what was I thinking about when I sat in those meetings and we arrived at these numbers where we were going to ask for the community to bring seven million more dollars to MPS. So here's a few. Our vocational students deserve access to the arts and AP classes and they shouldn't have to take Spanish or any other language online because the schedule is simply incompatible. That is what happens today. Fixing it is a huge undertaking and it's gonna change the structure of the school day and the schedule for every single student at the high school. So it's a big deal. All of our students deserve more time for learning. We have the shortest school day around and it's time for Medford to do more than the minimum. More students deserve access to transportation because two miles is too far to walk to school. It doesn't matter how old you are, that's a long walk. Our staff deserve investment in high quality professional development and support as they develop their craft as educators. Our paras deserve a living and competitive wage and so do our teachers. This is a big deal. We've made a lot of progress for our paraprofessionals, but there's so much to do. Our athletes, our extracurricular participants, they deserve the very best opportunities we can provide, and that starts with increasing our coaching and advisor stipends. They have not been addressed in a decade or more. They are fractional compared to the time that our advisors and our coaches put into our students, and we need to do something about that. Our buildings deserve maintenance. It's the most boring thing, but it's so important. The project to replace the HVAC system at McGlynn and Andrews is $20 million alone. $20 million. So that project is ongoing, but $20 million will be spent on that project. And that's just so that those buildings can have acceptable HVAC systems, and it's not too hot to learn in September. just this morning I got a list of immediate repair needs that are happening that are happening across the district as we prepare for the start of school it was a cool half million dollars right there so the need across the school our buildings are all new but they're aging our buildings are new but they're 20 years old and that means their their systems are at the end of life so we have to be prepared to do something different than we've done all along we have to maintain what we have so we don't have to do this again because I think that's critically important. Certainly the Medford High School project is a bit of a separate matter than what we're talking about tonight if anyone wants to have if anyone has questions about the Medford High building project please let me know I'm happy to answer them after this meeting. So the list goes on that's my list I've probably already spent seven million dollars so I'll stop there. And I know we all have a list, and I think that's really important. So when we do this in November, the next thing that happens is we start talking about now what? What is the plan, and how are we going to best use this money? And I want to see all of you at that table. That's a very public process. It happens on the floor, out in the open, in the light of day, so that we can hear from people about what those priorities are and what they think is important. But first, we have to get there.
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total time: 9.95 minutes total words: 1679 |
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