Feds send just $1.7M to Lynn schools

LYNN – The Lynn Public Schools will receive just more than $1.7 million in federal education recovery funds in fiscal year 2010, Gov. Deval Patrick announced at a press conference in Framingham Thursday.Touting the funding effort as a large part of his Massachusetts Recovery Plan to “secure the state’s economic future,” Patrick announced 166 districts that will get a portion of $168 million in federal education recovery funds, based solely on the difference between a community’s chapter 70 local aid and foundation budget.According to Patrick, the money will give the 166 districts the ability to preserve programs and avoid teacher layoffs next year at a time when the economic crisis is forcing communities such as Lynn to push class sizes to the max and cut programs down to the bare minimum.Superintendent Catherine Latham and Business Administrator Kevin McHugh announced last week that, despite not having a bottom line from the state, they would begin preparing the fiscal 2010 budget based on fiscal year 2009 numbers – all but assuring layoffs and program cuts.While the total $1,742,813 will go a long way in helping Lynn avoid some of those layoffs and cuts, the payout is still likely too small to completely solve the city’s upcoming budget crisis.Mayor Edward J. Clancy Jr. says he is happy to accept any help that the city will receive from the state, but was critical of the formula used to determine how much funding each community would receive.”I am grateful that we are getting additional monies to bring into the city, but if you look at the entire list there are a lot of incongruities,” he said. “Whoever was putting this together – and I am not blaming the governor or any one person – but whoever was putting this together was not looking at the whole picture.”According to the Patrick administration, the funding released is not based on the individual needs of cities and towns, or even those communities’ total budgets, rather the gap between a community’s portion of $3.984 billion in Chapter 70 funds and that community’s foundation budget.The state education reform law, first passed in 1993, established so-called foundation budgets for communities, setting a minimum funding threshold districts must meet so that students receive a “fair and adequate” education.Due to what Patrick has called an “historic drop-off in state revenue collections brought on by the recession,” level-funding of Chapter 70 prevented 166 districts from reaching foundation spending levels.Clancy says by funding only the foundation gap, Patrick is essentially rewarding communities that have failed to properly fund public education and ignoring the communities that are in real need of help.Despite Lynn’s $1.7 million foundation gap, created mostly from a drop in revenue and spike in cost as the economy tumbles, the city has over funded the school budget in recent years. In addition, Clancy helped to ease the blow of Patrick’s recent $2.7 million local aid cut in Lynn earlier this year by taking the smallest percentage of money from the schools of any department in the city.Clancy says he needs to look no further than Lynn’s neighbors to the north and south for examples of what is wrong with Patrick’s plan, as Salem and Revere are each in line for a much larger payout despite only serving a fraction of the number of students schooled in Lynn.If Patrick’s numbers remain the same, Salem will get $3,215,367 from the stimulus and Revere will take home even more, $5,251,378, something that just doesn’t make sense to Clancy.”If you just look at those two communities for the sake of staying local, you have Revere with about 6,000 students getting over $5.3 million and Salem with about 4,000 students getting over $3.2 million, so that is $8.5 million for two communities with 10,000 students and we get $1.7 million for our 14,000 students,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for what we are getting, but I am just saying there are some incongruities there.”Ot