By the time Pittsburgh Public Schools solicited public input on its 2024 general fund budget, much had already been decided — or, at least, that’s how it appeared to speakers during the Dec. 4 budget hearing.
“This is a tight turnaround and we haven't been engaged yet,” said Sarah Zangle, a parent of two children in the district. “This is the first time that we've been engaged.”
Members of Pittsburgh Public Schools’ board of education will vote on the budget Wednesday, one month after the 344-page proposal was posted online for the public to inspect.
School administrators previously discussed their fiscal plans with board members during three live streamed budget workshops in September and November.
Those meetings, however, were used primarily by administrators to present budget decisions, rather than deliberate changes with the board.
“This is really not the spirit of a budget workshop,” former director Pam Harbin said during the Nov. 28 meeting. “I don’t know what happened, but it’s after the budget already came out, so we’re not workshopping anything.”
Harbin is among the current and former board members who have called on the district to revisit its budget process, raising questions about transparency.
Their concerns center on when and how those budget workshops should happen, as well as the role both board members and taxpayers play in deliberating the district’s finances.
“I think what's lacking is whatever input the community feels they should have, and needs to have, in that process,” director Gene Walker said. “And I think there's a bit [of input they should have] because it's their money that we're spending.”
Board members and parents aren’t the only ones with concerns. Experts who oversee the district’s budget, including the City of Pittsburgh’s controller, think the budget process needs an overhaul; in September the district’s credit rating was downgraded by the credit-ratings agency Moody’s.
The importance of a more transparent process could be critical in the coming year as the district is likely going to have to make budget cuts that it has put off for several years while using federal COVID-relief funds to plug its budget holes.
Because of that, next year’s budget process could include controversial decisions about which schools the district chooses to close and which jobs to cut.
New board promises earlier look at budget, more engagement
Walker said making it easier for people to get involved in the budget development process will help build trust as these challenging conversations are had.
“It's important for us to be willing to have the discussions that are necessary to say, ‘Hey, this thing is broken and people don't trust us to do it well.’ And so we have to start to rebuild that by making tough decisions, but doing it in a way that helps people understand how — long-term — there's going to be benefit.”
Walker, who was elected board president at a reorganization meeting earlier this month, told WESA he plans to schedule workshops for the district’s 2025 budget early next year.
Board members are required to hold no less than three budget workshops, according to a resolution passed in February 2020. An amendment to that policy added this fall mandated that they be “held early enough in the year to allow for Board and community input into the upcoming year’s budget.”
Walker said this year, the policy was “interpreted in a way that technically satisfies the rule that we put in place, but doesn't really do what we're looking to do.”
School board members, he added, must hold administrators accountable next time around.
But according to notes obtained by WESA from a closed-door meeting in October, administrators don’t feel as though the board had given them clear directions about the purpose of the budget process: is it about educating the board or facilitating public engagement?
“We just need to know how the board would like that to be organized in terms of the information that we should focus on, because it's a very large document and we can go line by line and not a lot of questions are answered or asked,” said PPS chief financial officer Ron Joseph.
Administrators also said they had solicited the board’s preferences in a January 2023 survey on the budget development process. According to superintendent Wayne Walters, not one member responded.
Board members did, however, offer administrators extensive feedback on the process at a committee meeting that same month, addressing many of the questions posed in the survey and highlighting the need for increased transparency, community input, and equity in the budgeting process.
To Walker, most parents and community members don’t need to understand the fine details of the district’s budget. They do, however, need to believe in the people constructing it.
“I think we should probably get to a point where there is some trust that what we put out on a high level has been scrutinized on the micro level in a way that, hopefully, is satisfying,” he said.
That could come from changes to the budget development process that make it more welcoming to parents. Walker said that the district’s budget hearings, for one, should be scheduled at an opportune time for the district’s families.
This year’s budget hearing began Monday at noon — a time many in attendance said was not reasonable for most working parents.
Several speakers at the hearing also urged administrators to include in the preliminary budget information that shows how and where expenditures would be used. Past budgets included breakdowns of just how many full-time teachers, counselors and other staff had been budgeted for, although that information has not been included since the preliminary budget for 2022.
The district hasn’t provided budget ‘narratives’ — which gave an overview of staffing, responsibilities, goals and finances for each department — since 2021.
According to Joseph, reporting software the district switched to in July 2021 doesn’t automatically create budget personnel breakdowns. He said that information, as well as “trimmed down” narratives, will be manually prepared in time for the final budget — that, however, won’t happen until after the board’s budget vote.
To Emily Sawyer, a parent of five PPS students who spoke at the budget hearing, that limits the opportunity for informed public input.
“There may be numbers that simply aren't known yet or haven't been calculated, but even if these numbers are added right before the board has to vote, this precludes the most true public input on the details and really even precludes informed votes by the board members,” Sawyer said. “It begs the question why the timeline is so tight.”
To that end, Walters said the district intends to be as transparent as possible.
“We think we’ve been very transparent with what it is that we’re doing with the budget,” Walters told WESA. “We’re required to do certain things by the state and we’ve done so, and some things are in process. We’re not hiding anything as a district because it’s about serving our students and our families, and so that’s what we continue to do.”
Calls for transparency from inside the district appear to have gone unheeded
Still, others at the public hearing pointed to the City of Pittsburgh’s model of community outreach, which it began months before proposing its 2024 budget.
The city — which also voted on its budget this month — held budget feedback sessions in five neighborhoods this October, following months of community engagement this spring and summer. The city controller’s office also maintains Open Book Pittsburgh, a public database of government contracts, campaign finance reports and lobbyists.
City controller Michael Lamb, who also serves as the school controller for the district, said he’s offered to come to the school district and teach them about tools like Open Book Pittsburgh.
Lamb told the district’s superintendent, solicitor and board members in February that they “could do more to make its finances more open, transparent and accessible,” according to a February email obtained by WESA.
“They don't have that functionality at the school district, and they should,” Lamb told WESA. “I think that's one of the things that we've stressed but haven't really gone anywhere.”
Solving the district’s budget woes will require big cuts — and community trust
Lamb said that anything the district does to be more transparent about its finances will be helpful, especially given the difficult financial decisions the PPS must make to reduce its budget deficit.
The district continues to lose hundreds of students each year and, with them, millions of dollars in revenue. As students leave, many of its school buildings are increasingly less full: the district currently operates at 54% of its total capacity.
The now roughly $719 million proposed budget includes a $29 million deficit, and while the district has enough money in the bank to pay the bills as of now, its fund balance will drop below the minimum level the board has set for the district. Dipping into that pool sets the district up for a projected deficit of $10.7 million come 2025.
At the same time, PPS officials say the district is limited in what it can change. More than 40% of its operating budget is weighed down by state-mandated expenditures, such as charter school tuition and special education costs.
The district must also follow pension rate increases set by the PA Public School Employees’ Retirement System. While the system hasn’t seen a cost of living adjustment since 2004, the employer contribution rate has increased by 543% in the last decade, according to a 2023 report from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.
PSBA found that as much as 90% of budget costs are eaten up by expenditures over which school districts have little or no control due to mandated costs.
But Kevin Carter, who served as the chair of the school district’s Budget and Finance Committee for six years but decided not to run for reelection this year, said that the district can’t attribute its entire deficit to these mandated costs.
“It's easy to blame charter schools as the largest non-district expense, but the reason why our kids are going to charter schools is because they're not learning,” he said. “The board is supposed to be ensuring checks and balances, and they are not.”
The credit ratings agency Moody’s recently downgraded the district’s financial rating because of this ongoing structural deficit. That could make it more expensive for the district to borrow money for future capital projects like air conditioning installations.
While nothing about the measures PPS will take to mitigate its financial tumult is certain, a draft strategic plan framework introduced earlier this month raises the prospect of redesigning school configurations and consolidating schools “to maximize resources.”
Pennsylvania law requires any district planning school closures to hold a public hearing no less than three months before any related board vote.
Walker, the board president, said a first budget workshop in March, for instance, would allow the district sufficient time to show the financial outlook they’re projecting and the steps necessary to prevent any deficit.
“We can spend time during the year getting an idea of, what are the needs of the community, what are the needs of our schools, what kind of school district do we want to have and what is it going to take to make that happen from a financial standpoint — and then backfilling with the details.”
The district will need to get this under control, he added, if it hopes to earn the trust of taxpayers and parents.
