Brookline Schools Stashing Federal Dollars to Ward Off Future Cuts

Brookline school officials are planning to stash away around $450,000 in new federal jobs money to help bolster the schools budget against major cuts in 2011, when federal stimulus money is set to dry up.

The payout was announced yesterday by Gov. Deval Patrick, whose office is responsible for doling out $204 million allocated to the state by the Education Jobs Fund act, which President Obama signed into law on Aug. 10. The new money is expected to save some 2,700 teaching jobs that had been on the chopping block in communities around Massachusetts.

But none of those jobs will be in Brookline, where school officials managed to avoid layoffs this year by patching together a budget with one-time money and cuts to spending on supplies and technology.

Instead, Superintendent Bill Lupini said he expects to use the new money to restore the spending cuts while squirreling the rest away in preparation for fiscal 2012, when the roughly $1 million in stimulus funding the district relies on is set to run out.

In an interview with Brookline Patch, Governor Patrick said there's nothing wrong with communities like Brookline setting the money aside for a year, even if it was intended to helps schools avoid laying teachers off this fall.

"They have that latitude," the governor said. "The law says that the state has to distribute it through our formula in this fiscal year, but the school districts can use it over the course of this and the next fiscal year."

The federal funds were doled out according to the state's education funding formula and will guarantee that all Massachusetts schools receive more state aid for education than they did last fiscal year. Brookline is set to receive $25 more in state aid per student, the minimum under the formula.

Patrick said the extra money would help the state fulfill its commitment to Massachusetts's children.

"You don't get to sit out the second or third grade until the recession is over—now is your chance," he said. "What this does is allows us, at the state level, to keep up our end of the bargain."

But the governor offered no plan for mitigating the cuts expected to hit next summer, when communities across the country will see millions in funding from the American Recover and Reinvestment Act vanish. Many municipalities, including Brookline, have used to the money to cover gaps in their operating budgets for the last two years.

Patrick said the best way to get local budgets back on track is to fuel growth in the economy, pointing to his administration's emphasize on supporting innovation and technology in Massachusetts. The governor noted that commonwealth appears to have pulled out of the recession faster than the rest of the country.

"We've got to continue to focus on job one, which is creating jobs, sustainable jobs," he said. "And that's what we've been about."

In Brookline, Superintendent Lupini said the new job money, along with careful financial planning, will give the schools "a fighting chance" of avoiding deep cuts going in to fiscal 2012, which he still described as a "nightmare."

This year's budget had relied on around $600,000 in one-time money from a reserve account the schools have kept at around $1.2 million for several years. The new jobs money will allow the school to put most of that money back, while restoring around $125,000 in cuts to supply and technology spending.

Brookline finance officials normally avoid using one-time money to prop up gaps in the town and school operating budgets, but Lupini said it may be the best option in the coming year.

"We recognize that anytime we do that, we're taking a chance that it may not be there the following year," he said. "But we've done it in some cases to avoid the level of cuts we might need to make otherwise."