Providence Committee on Finance-Thursday, May 22, 2025-6:00 PM

Let me know. Too loud for a woman. Like, that's. Good evening. My name is Helen Anthony.

I am calling to order our meeting this evening, committee of finance Monday, Thursday, May 27 at 06:03PM. Madam Chairwoman Anthony. Present. Vice Chairman Taylor is absent. Counselor Andy Watt.

Present. Councilwoman Graves. Absent, counselor Sanchez.

Present. We

have three presidents. You're absent and informed. Thank you so much, and I'd like to thank Bethany Shaw who's here from the city solicitor's office. I'd like to thank counselor Peterson who has joined us this evening. And, of course, always are the one that will this evening.

We really appreciate you stabbing us tonight. Okay. With that, I think we're gonna I'm gonna ask for a motion to waive the readings of agenda items one through five. Motion by. All in favor?

Aye. All opposed? And with that, it brings us to our discussion with the Providence Public School Department. So what I'd like to do is have you all stand, and I'm gonna swear everyone. If you don't mind, just in case we have to ask you a question.

So everyone will be sworn in. We can proceed. Okay. Thank you so much, everyone. And superintendent, come right up to the table with whoever you'd like.

Oh, and staff, Scott, And before we start, I would like to mark the presentation or the documents that are being presented in 600 times exhibit number 24.

Okay.

With that, we will let you proceed. I I I'm not sure how you're gonna handle your presentation. I don't know whether you would like us to pull up the questions till the end or whether we can pause at certain times. Yeah.

It's not fine. We we have a brief presentation of questions throughout the

budget with you as well. I'd like to start by sharing that Providence Public School is making steady, meaningful progress. And our turnaround action plan is actually working. We're starting to see the results of the smart student centered investments that we're doing. And I like to prioritize some of this work for you, so making sure that you're aware that we are supporting our multimillion learners with the resources and instructions that they deserve as well.

We're also expanding the access to high quality pre k, early childhood education. We're investing in rigorous standard based aligned curriculums, making sure that that's happening at every grade level. And we're also strengthening the teaching and learning through ongoing high impact professional development for staff as well, especially with our most enabled learners and especially with our affiliated students as well. And then this is also making sure that there were it's helping us to build a stronger and better outcome for students. And, you know, I just wanna make sure that everyone's aware that, you know, regardless what some people may be saying, we are making those gains.

We are making growth. We are moving in the right direction. And I know that if we continue to do this as a partnership, then we will make the difference that we need to do not only to our schools, but also in our communities. So I wanna say thank you for that opportunity to be here with me as well. And I will turn it over to deputy superintendent Zach who will walk us through the presentation for today.

Thank you so much, and thanks again for having us with you today. We're very grateful to be to be with you. So we have a presentation that we'll we'll walk you and some of that is context as well as the overview of the. And we're more than happy, given the small group, to stop at any point that are. So if you if you turn just to the opening on slide two just to frame what the presentation is, The first is really a budget overview, and I know we've done this before, and so you may be familiar with it.

But I think you often find time that in our home settings, it's often through the line, but it's a few important pieces of context around that budget. We'll then talk about our planning for this year, some of our both the process and the priorities. And then lastly, give an overview of our budget and then talk with any other details that you'd like in in the. And, again, please feel free to stop me in any time. So to to begin our budget overview, we look at slide three, which gives us a sense of when we're looking at the DPSC budget from the revenue side, the the major components of our budget.

What we'll spend most of our time or most exclusively our time tonight on is our local budget, which is the of city and state aid. That's used for ongoing operational expenses and and most of what we spend in money in the district. A smaller portion, but still in the still an important portion is our nonlocal budget, which is in federal dollars and in in what I would often call the consolidated resource plan. This includes items on title one, title two, IDEA, and other and other purchases. Those funds tend to be restricted and focused on certain activities, and while they're smaller and important part of our our Lastly, in addition to those kind of more steady sources of funding, we also received grants in the districts.

Obviously, over the past few years as the city has as well, through coronavirus relief funding and pest funding, there was a a large uptick in that, but that is now kind of all passed and behind us. But we still receive grants of of smaller acres for the work we do in the district. And then, again, what we know facilities bonds, of which I know this means that very well aware of, not part of the district's budget, but something we work very closely on with the city in terms of cabinet managers for our schools. So let's do a deeper dive on slide four into our local budget. So zooming in on on that source of revenue that comprises our operating budget.

About two thirds of that comes from. Almost the remaining third comes from, and then there's a small portion that comes from. Our is driven by average daily membership, which is very similar to enrollment, but it's based on the the number of days a student is enrolled. So if a student is enrolled for a hundred and eighty days, it counts with the student. The student's enrolled for half a year, counts for a portion of that student.

There are also doctors for students experiencing poverty, and now multimodal orders, weights are added into that. So that's tied to average daily membership as well as reductions based on seat additions for charter schools for the coming year. City, obviously, a point we had a lot of discussion about. There's obviously an important this year. It's been we've come we're taking a lot of clarity on MCA for this time of year.

So it's tied to the city's maintenance effort and and most recently based on the settlement agreement between the district and the city. So it allows us to plan both for this year and the coming years for our our MS. The smaller smaller portion is Medicaid and other items. That accounts for roughly 2% of locally, but items that fall into that bucket are Medicaid indirect costs, which is overhead for Graves, as well as investment we receive for investing cash that we have available as the city does. It's a kind of a focus on the revenue side.

We now look at the expense side just to give a broad kind of categorization of our budget, and we must have set our f r 24 expenditures. And I think it just helps to to to put, you know, a sense of magnitude on different expenditures in the district. So when we look at our f y twenty four budget, we we kinda break that down into a few buckets. The first is the difference between our in dis in district costs and out of district costs. Our out of district costs are for expenditures such as charter schools for which we pass along the city contribution.

So it is registered as an expense, but it was really a pass through, as well as payments to tuition payments for students attending the MET, Davis, or a district special education school. So that is what we are in this case kind of thing with us. It's funds that are going to students outside of PPS that go into a PPSD school. When we then look at our industry budget, we wanna categorize that by both those funds that are spent at at schools and then funds that are managed essentially. And we'll look into our school based cost.

We're gonna see the vast majority, about 87% of the dollars that the district receives and are spent within the district go to support and spend with both students as. So so we get that breakdown of the 87%, and this is very similar that we've been to school districts. We have people organization, and so the vast majority of our expenditures for the school level are on people. So if you look at both salaries and benefits, it's up to three to 5% of spending at the schools are to support either the salaries and benefits of our employees. There's smaller expenditures related to custodial services, transportation services, and other direct services that we're having to students.

We have supplies and equipment, but those, as as you'll see both here and in our plans for next year, are a relatively small part of our budget when we really dedicate services and benefits and salaries. In the appendix, if you'd like, we had a breakdown of the the smaller portion of central office, but it also follows similar in terms of having, you know, the the majority of it covering benefits and salaries. So, again, that was just to kinda give an overview and and a sense of magnitude of where our revenue comes from as a as a district general and and as expenditures. So now we can turn more towards both the planning for this coming year as well as our detailed. So as we plan on slide eight, you'll see and and hopefully this is a familiar graphic is our turnaround action plan.

And so this is where we start our planning based on the rules and the turnaround action plan. So turnaround action plan has four pillars, which is actually in similarly world class talent, engaged communities, efficient district systems. And so we prioritize and make sure our investments are in. So as we plan ahead, we wanna sustain those investments we've made there that we think are worth continuing as well as adding those that we can grow and enhance student achievement. We also know in addition to this, we have rising student needs, and we'll spend, I think, a good amount of time talking about areas where we are seeing rising student need and where both because it's the right thing to do, but also for compliance reasons, we need to make investments as a district.

And then lastly, in every year, we plan for longer and probably just to save the location that is making finding ways to spend our money more efficiently as well as ensure we are ahead of the future. So if you turn to slide nine, and this I think it's a little bit of what the superintendent mentioned, and this talks about kind of looking back at our investments. And and I I I do think it's important even though it's, you know, the focus of tonight is on the coming fiscal year. Really, the highlight, both where we've seen gains and what some of the investments we made that that we believe have led to those gains. So when you think broadly about teaching and learning, the district has made significant investments over the past five years, both with our operating budgets as well as with onetime dollars to both enhance teaching and learning through high quality curriculum materials, aligned data systems, and profession professional development for teachers, as well as in this most recent year extending the school day by the equivalent of fifteen school days for students.

What we've seen this past year in terms of student achievement, PPSC was the only local school district in the state that got improved outcomes on RideCast ELA and MAP as well as SAT ELA and MAP. In addition so that's the the something we're very proud of district wide. But then if you look at kind of the excellence in individual schools, there were nine schools statewide that saw an increase of 5% in student achievement in ELA and MAP and a reduction of five five plus percent in chronic absenteeism. Of those nine schools, five are province, which, again, schools that we're very proud of and it speak down to overall needs we've seen in the district, but actually some really bright spots of specific schools. We then focus on a specific group of students that we think a lot about, and a lot of our work in the in the over the past five years is focused on, which is supporting our multimillion learners.

So if you recall, I think we shared some information when we were with you last year. Prior to the intervention, there were around 23% of our students identified as multimillion learners. We are about 40%. Rhode Island, I think, has led the nation as a state in the in the percentage of students percentage of growth in students who are multimillion learners. It's a tremendous asset for us as a district, and we wanna make sure we are providing adequate support for our students and our teachers to support them.

So we made significant investments in teacher certification reimbursement. This was first funded through at a smaller level, and then we were able to increase it through Ester and have been able to sustain it post ESTER funds. And this has allowed us to dramatically increase the percent of teachers who are certified to teach our multimillionaire students. We've also made investments to support translation and interpretation services for our families. So this is an expense that's grown over the past few years.

It's the right thing to do, and it allows our families to come into any school or office in the district and be greeted and and have translation services to their needs. I think, again, some pretty clear results in where we've seen outcomes here. So in prior to the intervention, the district was put under a Department of Justice Justice settlement degree that many districts have been in for decades. So Boston has been with for ten plus years. The district recently was released from that agreement.

Totally

released within five five years. Within five years. Yeah. Okay. That means a lot of effort.

So a lot of the information that you're receiving today, the investments that we've made to make sure that we address those needs for the NLL students, and that was a huge part of why we did that work and making sure that the students receive what they what they deserve, the resources that they deserve. And right now, that's the outcome. So that's the movement in the right direction. And

then on the on the on the student achievement front there, we've seen far more students reading, reading their tools on on English proficiency assessments being smoother compared to prior to being. And then lastly, early childhood, an area that we've made significant investments both because it's the right thing to do, but also there's been an area that may have not received as much attention as it should have and let's let's assume court interventions for a lack of pre k evaluation students for our earliest learners. So we've increased the number of pre evaluation screening teams. So these are individuals who are screening not not just students in in province, but any any any student that lives in the in the city where they become a a student or not, screens them for educational services. That that that's required us to add both screening teams as well as classrooms to support the number of students that come in.

That's allowed us to nearly double the number of pre K seats for students between twenty four and twenty five sorry, between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty. So that's looking backwards. If we now look forward and talk to you the more specific priorities for this coming year. And so we wanna follow along with kind of what we said as our as our approach of prioritizing prioritizing. Our.

So first is looking at our investments aligned with the current active plan that both in areas where we wanna increase investment or just state investment. The first is an excellence in learning. And what we'll see here, and this is due to actually the use of federal dollars that we've reallocated federal dollars to support student facing interventionists. So, historically, each school had had a instructional coach, and these individuals were incredibly important to supporting the rollout of new curriculum. But one of the things we've looked at over the past few years is to see schools that have seen the most gains in terms of student learning and what what their staffing model was that we had led to that.

And so what we what we saw were that that schools that had interventionists, so these are teachers who typically pull small groups of students out and work in small group settings. Schools that have those either as a math interventionist or ELA interventionist tended to see the most gains. And I think the hypothesis there or what we believe to be true is, you know, what we've heard time and time again from our teachers is post pandemic is that not only has the amount of student need increased, but the variation in student need has increased dramatically. So the ability to differentiate both in full group settings, but also in small group settings has become incredibly important. So one of the the decisions we made for this year is to reallocate federal funding from coaching to interventionists because we've seen strong student outcomes there.

Second is at our secondary schools is a change in schedule, which is it sounds very it's very quirky and technical, but it's actually incredibly important to the day to day impact that a student may see. So many of our high schools are going through a redesign process, which which involves added career technical education pathways and electives. And to be able to adequately take advantage of that, it can be difficult for our multilingual learners who often have or always have an additional class for English language development. So the normal schedule, they're often taking five of these. They're taking their core classes plus English language development, which makes it very difficult for them to fully engage in some of the CTE pathways at our schools.

So one of the transitions we made at our high schools next year, our redesigned high schools, is to move towards a seven period schedule, which allows for more options for students. It does require more staff, but it's important for us to ensure that all of our students in our high schools can take advantage of kind of the rich offerings that many of our schools are seeing, it's at home doing their arts redesign at JSEC where they're doing life sciences to that this was an important investment that we that Kevin is gonna become here. Last thing in this area, we're continuing to support our translation and interpretation for our families. We refuted the contracts to get more competitive break, but we continue to see a kind of high demand for that both in terms of the interpretation for families as well as translations of documents for our families. We then look at rising student need.

We again continue to see growth in early childhood in early childhood years for among our different legal students. So for this coming year, we are planning to add six additional special education costumes at the K-twelve level to support increases in pre K and kindergarten students that we've seen over the past few years. We also, as I mentioned, have invested in pre K costumes in prior years and in screening and evaluation teams, and we anticipate continued notice in the years ahead. And and we'll spend some time talking about this later. We've seen our out of district placement expenses go up.

We've taken a lot of steps this year to safely bring students back and have been able to control them, but that is a sustained increase in our budget in prior years. When we then look at long term financial sustainability, so these are areas where we are working to reduce spending or or spend our money in different ways. So one is doing increased recruitment of retention for special education teachers. That has been one of the main challenges we've had that that in some cases have led to out of district placements where we can't. As we see the growth in the number of those students and the need for additional classrooms, at the same time, there's a teacher shortage in this area.

So our HR team has done a a lot of work, both short term and long term to fill those vacancies, and that's helped a lot of us, and bring many students safely back this year. We are excited that we've been able to reach what we believe is a win win with our colleagues in the city on energy credits. So this is something that we've gone back and forth on over the past few years, but it allows the district to take advantage of some of the city's energy credits and the city to receive, you know, contribution in exchange for energy credits that they may not be able to use otherwise. And then lastly, as we see our footprint district footprint continuing to change, we will see reductions in the as we move more of those schools temporarily to switch based and and then ultimately full time into new schools. Alright.

Get into the next year. K. That's good. The the last two slides are gonna quickly process. Slide 11 talks to our student based budgeting model, IRN.

They were we're always helpful. Happy to talk more in-depth about this, but this is a we're now in the third year of implementation of student based budgeting, and this allows us to both be more transparent with our schools about how funding is allocated, but also interested in funding for the student and is different here with the student. So the way it works is we have students that have different needs, whether they're learning the students, and then we have a lot of schools. On the one hand, actually, we're get information from you, and then when we have to make decisions in there, then we be. So we get early information in November.

Some updated information in terms of enrollment and margin, save revenues. And then, ultimately, we have to wait till June until the general assembly passes involved, which is getting like that's particularly is what we're this year. So throughout the year, we're obviously having to make decisions as we get more and more information, and that aligns with how we've done much more engagement work. So engaging early on with early information that we have and then working with our as well as committee over the past few months as we prepare our budget.

Okay. Thank you. I'm just I have two quick questions, and I'm gonna open up my colleagues. I was just looking at page number four that you your revenues and the

26 is. Okay.

Okay. Sorry about that. Great. Clarifying that. So that is what our here.