Friday, December 12, 2008

Education


Brookline Freezes Hiring in Response to State Budget Cuts

By Chelsea Rice

BROOKLINE— Runkle School principal David Summergrad has missed the district’s data analyst. The woman who used to provide the principal and other school officials with quick test results and specifics on student performance moved last March, and the position remains vacant, like a growing number of other positions in the school system.

Responding to $3 million cuts in the state's school budgets this week, Superintendant Bill Lupini froze hiring yesterday for positions outside the classroom. The freeze coincides with this week's decrease in funding for Circuit Breaker, a special education program, and Metco, which transports inner-city children to schools in Brookline.

"The first state cuts affect the school systems throughout the state only in a relatively small way," said Alan Morse, the finance liaison for the Brookline School Committee. "It will affect our special education cost and we were looking for an increase in funding for our Metco program, and that will probably not happen."

The Circuit Breaker program pays for the needs of students with medical and learning disabilities by transporting them to specialized schools where the tuition can cost $100,000, and providing teaching and medical aides make their participation in regular school possible. Officials say the contingency fund set up by the school system, which is set aside in the budget for unexpected cases, will now be used to cover the cuts made by the state in this program.

"I think we are absorbing the cut right now," said Summergrad, principal of Runkle School in Fisher Hill, which runs an Autism Spectrum program with more than 30 children. "That money we put aside for 'just in case', we are now having to use."

The hiring freeze and budget cuts won’t affect the majority of classrooms or class sizes yet, said Peter Rowe, deputy superintendent for Administration and Finance. The hiring freeze does not affect teachers, but it will freeze open positions at the administrative, maintenance, and clerical positions through the school system, Rowe said.

"The forces are all pushing though," Morse said. "It is difficult because the population of kids is growing, which requires us to hire more teachers—unless we increase class sizes, which the citizens don't want us to do."

Kindergarten classes have grown 25% over the past four years, according to the Brookline Public School statistics.

"We've defined [the hiring freeze] as a review of all positions and a freeze on non-classroom positions," said Rowe. "Direct classroom positions we have to fill, we don't really have a choice [because of community's priority to maintain small classroom sizes]."

Metco, a state-funded program which expected an increased budget this year, will not receive increases and will also have to tighten its budget by $80,000. The program, established in 1966, helps 300 inner-city children attend Brookline schools.

Transportation for Metco will probably face the most cuts, especially buses from after-school programs. This will avoid affecting the students' school days, but will limit their access to after-school activities.

"I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we won't be looking at significant cuts or layoffs,” said Summergrad. “Hopefully three or four months from now it may all go back to normal.”

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