SCAPEGOATS SERVE SPENDING SNOWBALLING SHORTFALLS

About a month has passed since Mayor Kennedy brought Lynn into the national spotlight with her statements on the precarious state of Lynn’s public school budget. The mayor pointed to a new flood of immigrant children arriving in Lynn as the source of the Lynn Public Schools’ financial woes, even travelling all the way to Washington, D.C., to speak with the Center for Immigration Studies (“CIS”), a think tank for the anti-immigrant movement. While it is clear Lynn faces serious budget issues, a quick look at the facts shows a story very different from the one the mayor has been telling to the media and to the rest of the country.

Here are the facts: The State of Massachusetts requires the City of Lynn to spend a minimum amount of money on the schools each year. In order for the Lynn schools to receive state funding (around 75% of our total school budget) Lynn must meet this required spending amount, called Net School Spending. When the city spends less than 100% of Net School Spending, the remaining unspent amount is factored into the following year’s Net School Spending number. When the city spends less than 95% of Net School Spending, Lynn faces a penalty which results in losses to our state funding. Every year Lynn falls farther behind Net School Spending, the city has to spend more and more just to meet the legal minimum.

Perpetual under-spending and underfunding have been problems in the Lynn schools for years, but since Mayor Kennedy first took office in 2010, the cuts to the school budget have become even more pronounced: Lynn schools were underfunded in: FY96 (99.8%); FY00 (99.6%); FY11 (99.5%); FY12 (98.3%); FY13 (94.3%); FY14 (92.1%). The cycle of under-spending has forced the 9.3% increase in the school budget that the mayor pins on an increase of foreign born students.

This year, the budget was raised to $126 million. However, that does not mean the schools are getting the necessary funding they need in order to operate. Mayor Kennedy believes net school spending to be about $129 million, while the school department estimates it is closer to $137 million. In either case, the amount that was authorized for the school department is likely lower than the amount the city needs to spend in order to meet its responsibilities. There is also a substantial difference between the Mayor and the Superintendent’s budget which begs the question of why so much less was allocated to the school department than the superintendent requested.

If the increase of 538 foreign born kids (unaccompanied minors in particular) in the 2013-14 school year were really the cause of increase in the school budget, which Mayor Kennedy claims forced a 2-4% cut to all other departments, it would mean each kid would have to cost the city a whopping $24,163.57. In reality, per pupil spending is a lot less: $14,000 when all is averaged out. Further, the percentage of ELL students (defined as “a student whose first language is a language other than English who is unable to perform ordinary classroom work in English”) has actually decreased significantly in Lynn in recent years, from 25.8% in 2008-09 to 17.8% in 2013-14. What’s more, only about a fifth of this years’ new foreign born students are actually unaccompanied minors. Again, this shows that our budget problems, including cuts to the police and fire departments, are clearly the result of chronic underfunding to schools and increasing debt to the state, not a “flood” of young immigrants.

That being said, it undeniably takes greater resources to educate our English Language Learning students. Luckily, there are plenty of Title III federal grants available to cities like Lynn to use for exactly that purpose. The city has applied for and received these grants, yet over the past years has not spent them. According to the Massachusetts Department of Education in 2013, Lynn received a Title III grant of $530,860. For that same year, Lynn claimed an estimated $177,000 of that money yet only spent $4,000 and returned an estimated $173,000. Lynn has claimed only $154,869 of the 2014 award of $449,389 to date and is likely to reapply for the remaining $294,520.00 as carryover funds for the following year. The facts show that each year, the substantial unspent portions of these grants carry over into the next year, yet aren’t spent by the city. In addition, Lynn did not apply for a summer grant this past year, but was eligible to do so.

In the end, there are federal funds available to support our schools that are either not being spent or applied for. This makes it even more bizarre that the mayor went to D.C., not to advocate for increased federal funding for the school budget or to lobby for more federal support, but to speak with a group called Center for Immigration Studies (“CIS”). CIS is directly connected to the anti-immigrant movement. The organization’s academic standards are non-existent, and they write entire papers bashing immigrants only to admit that there is no actual data to support their position. The reason becomes clear when you see that their staff and board members have written forvdare.com, a white supremacist website. Indeed, their Senior Policy Analyst once said that immigration threatens, “(T)he American people as a whole and the future of Western civilization.”

The mayor’s divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric is not based in reality. Fear-mongering does nothing to solve the city’s problems. It only serves as a distraction from the city’s real challenges. As Yvonne Abraham wrote in a recent op-ed in the Boston Globe, Lynn would do well to look to Chelsea as an example. “We welcome and we educate,” Chelsea Superintendent Mary Bourque said. “We do not get into the political fray.” Instead of placing the blame for our financial problems on our most vulnerable residents, the mayor needs to do the work of actually solving these problems and creating a better city for all.

Carly McClain is organizer of the New Lynn Coalition, and she submitted this guest commentary on behalf of the Coalition.