jonetta rose barras: Money woes for DC’s public schools system
Mayor Muriel Bowser recently announced her intention to increase the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (UPSFF) by 12.4% when she submits her Fiscal Year 2025 Budget and Financial Plan to the DC Council next month. The hike in the UPSFF, which is the basic vehicle for financing DC’s public schools, could take base spending to $14,668 per student and reportedly result in a total of $821 million in formula-based funding for DCPS.
No one should think that Bowser’s seeming generosity is an indication that the District doesn’t have money woes. It does. And those for the public school system are significant — and about to hit hard because of diminishing federal funds.
“The FY 2025 DC Public Schools budget reflects our approach to budgeting this year: very tough choices balanced by an unwavering commitment to our DC values,” Bowser said in a statement released last Tuesday that accompanied DCPS’ distribution to schools and the public of its initial budget plan, which still must be finalized before it is formally sent to the legislature. She seemed to identify downtown revival, public safety and public schools as spending priorities.
“We know that even as we increase our local investments in public education, our schools will still feel the impacts of rightsizing,“ Bowser added.
That 20th-century concept may prove insufficient. As signaled by the local economy — the loss of commercial real estate tax revenues and a dying downtown, for example — DC’s money troubles won’t disappear next year or the year after that.
Bowser and her education team could use this money challenge as an opportunity for radical and bold thinking. They might consider how to release the system from its outdated agrarian and analog antecedents in this age of the internet and AI. Administration officials have been conducting boundary and facilities studies mandated by the DC Council. Should the mayor also embark on a full modernization of the education delivery system with an eye toward creating one that better reflects the needs and aspirations of DC residents, now and in the future?
I know that kind of visionary work may be foreign to the District government. Sometimes I have moments of optimism.
During the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, District political and education leaders — including DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee and those at charter schools — accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government through various temporary programs including the Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), but they did so without a solid, forward-thinking plan. DC’s public education spending increased at a recklessly fast rate with inauspicious results.
In 2019, the education budget was $1.7 billion. This year, it’s $2.7 billion.
In an introductory letter accompanying budget documents sent to school-based officials, Ferebee acknowledged that the DCPS workforce increased by 18% during the pandemic but student enrollment grew by only 2%. “This loss of federal funding, in combination with other economic factors, necessitates that districts nationwide examine their budgets with a critical eye looking for efficiencies where possible, and weighing programmatic and workforce reductions,” he wrote.
Bowser and Ferebee may have chosen to understate the fiscal hurt coming hard and soon to public schools. However, the D.C. Policy Center provided a klieg light with a report — “The Fiscal Future of Public Education in the District of Columbia” — released mere hours before the mayor and chancellor distributed their documents.
The center’s report, prepared by Yesim Sayin and Chelsea Coffin, revealed that DC’s budgets for public and public charter schools “show a 56 percent increase in spending while student enrollment grew by approximately 9 percent in the same period” of 2019-2024. In particular, there was increased spending on after-school programs as well as technology.
Much of that — though not all of it — was what the Policy Center called non-formula spending. “Prior to fiscal year 2021, these non-formula dollars made up a negligible share of [Local Education Agencies’] budgets,” wrote Sayin and Coffin.
“However, by fiscal year 2024, their share had increased to an estimated 15 percent.”
That points to tough budget challenges ahead.
“The expiration of federal fiscal aid, combined with a weakening revenue picture and lackluster enrollment growth, points to a loss of significant resources and a potential fiscal cliff for the District’s public schools,” wrote Sayin and Coffin.
“It will be difficult to make up for these gaps through a formula funding increase,” they predicted.
Speak up so the folks in the John A. Wilson Building can hear.
Patricia Brantley, CEO of Friendship Public Charter School, which consistently gets high marks for its academic programs and management, brought further clarity about the potential impact. “[From] 4%-8% of our annual budget is ESSER,” she said during the center’s webinar about the report. “It is not insubstantial.”
Ferebee has suggested there will be cuts throughout the DCPS system — in the local schools and in central administration. I’ll believe the latter when I see it. But if it’s true there are too many teachers for the student population, surely there also are too many central office staff members.
A sizable portion of federal relief dollars went to schools in economically disadvantaged communities. How will the city address the inequity baked in its system by that arcane per pupil formula? Children living in poor communities or attending under-enrolled schools have been getting the short shrift since I began reporting on public education in the late 1980s.
Ferebee said in his letter that “No school will lose more than five percent of their submitted budget, inclusive of one-time local funds, from one year to the next.
“This safety net is in place regardless of shifts in enrollment,” he added.
Given past, documented realities, it’s hard for me not to prejudge that the net will in fact have some holes.
As I reflected on these upcoming budget decisions, I couldn’t help asking myself this obvious question: What really matters in the provision of a quality education for District children?
Over the past several years, even before COVID-19, money flowed like water even though it didn’t always make it to the right spots. During the pandemic, the system was flooded with extra cash. There were investments in technology. There were funds for after-school programs. There were more teachers hired than needed for the number of students enrolled.
Test scores of District students may have improved slightly but not nearly enough to conclude that the influx of money was well-spent.
Something is wrong here — terribly wrong.
jonetta rose barras is an author and DC-based freelance journalist, covering national and local issues. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.
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