Testimony at the Performance Oversight Hearing for of the DC Education Agencies on Improving Transparency of the DCPS Enrollment Reserve

Chairman Mendelson and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Michael Johnson Jr., and I am a state policy fellow at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI). DCFPI is a nonprofit organization that promotes budget choices to reduce economic and racial inequality and build widespread prosperity in the District of Columbia through independent research and thoughtful policy recommendations.

Today, my testimony will continue with the theme of budget transparency discussed by my colleague, Qubilah Huddleston, but focus specifically on improving transparency of the DC Public School (DCPS) Enrollment Reserve. The Enrollment Reserve is used to meet staffing needs at schools that exceed their enrollment projections in the fall. Unfortunately, limited visibility into this fund, its uses, and historical allocations and expenditures undermine DCPS’s goal of budget transparency, endangers public accountability, and places schools at greater risk of receiving inadequate funding to meet mid-year student needs—especially those most in need.

DCFPI recommends that DCPS:

• Describe and publish in detail all allowable uses of the Enrollment Reserve, and the methodology that DCPS uses to estimate annual need.
• Annually publish accurate total approved appropriation and actual spending levels for the Enrollment Reserve to the DCPS Budget Data website.
• Publish all Enrollment Reserve expenditures for each school year directly to the DCPS Budget Data website with the following information: the date of the distribution, the recipient school name, distribution amount, and position funded.
• Annually publish all Enrollment Reserve requests including: the date of the request, the requesting school, amount requested, and purpose of the reprogramming request.

Lack of Public Visibility into the DCPS Enrollment Reserve

Budget transparency is a purported goal that DCPS holds as illustrated by their five-prong commitment to transparency listed in their Community Budget Guides.^[1] However, to date, DCPS has not lived up to their own transparency commitments as many of DCPS’s budgeting decisions and processes continue to be less than transparent and accessible to the public. Lack of transparency makes it more difficult for the DC Council and advocates to address the challenges of implementing budget investments.^[2]

For example, DCPS has continuously obscured the uses of “at-risk” funds, and supplants, rather than supplements, these dollars for core staffing positions instead of their intended purpose.^[3] Additionally, DCPS is limiting the public’s accessibility into accurate data on what—and how much—is spent at each school and central office due to discrepancies between individual school budgets published on DCPS’s budget website, those received by individual Local School Advisory Teams (LSATs), and those published in the District’s budget books.

The DCPS Enrollment Reserve is even more opaque, and the Chancellor has received significantly less scrutiny for the lack of transparency around this pot of money from lawmakers and other stakeholders. In fiscal year (FY) 2022, DCPS initially budgeted $6.7 million towards the Enrollment Reserve, which was subsequently reduced to just over $3.5 million following the DC Council’s decision to re-allocate $3.3 million to ensure a full-time librarian at every DCPS school.^[4] Without this reserve funding, schools with mid-year enrollment gains are forced to absorb costs for hiring essential school staff mid-year such as teachers and classroom aides, which is to the detriment of students and harms educational equity. More transparency around this money would enable the public to help identify whether certain schools have been forced to absorb costs that could or should have been covered by the Enrollment Reserve.

Unfortunately, the information that DCPS has shared publicly regarding this fund is extremely limited and the published total allocations available in the Chief Financial Officer’s Budget Books are largely inaccurate.^[5] DCPS distributes funding from this reserve to schools via the reprogramming process, which allows individual schools to request changes to their budget and staffing levels to meet student needs after school budgets are finalized in the spring. Although the DC Council published approved Enrollment Reserve reprogramming amounts for FY 2021, it does not include Enrollment Reserve requests that have been either not yet approved or denied. Moreover, neither DCPS nor the Council automatically publishes which schools and positions receive funding through Enrollment Reserve reprogramming, and only publishes that information after someone makes a formal information request to Equally troubling is DCPS’s failure to publicly provide specific guidance on which staffing positions can be covered with the Enrollment Reserve.

Enrollment Reserve Transparency as a Tool to Pursue Educational Equity

Without greater transparency of DCPS’s rules and practices for the Enrollment Reserve, it is difficult to determine to what extent the fund is adequately and efficiently offsetting the higher costs associated with mid-year enrollment gains; failure to adequately offset these higher costs would exacerbate current funding inequities for the District’s students who are among the most in need.^[6] And despite the narrative that money doesn’t matter, sustained investments in our students benefits student learning and outcomes beyond the classroom.^[7] Several schools are already struggling to maintain adequate staffing, instructional, and wraparound supports for all students, but particularly those who have faced the largest barriers to learning.

Supporting the staffing needs of schools experiencing the largest mid-year enrollment gains is an issue of educational equity considering differences in mid-year mobility across student groups. There are many factors outside of matriculation that contribute to mid-year mobility such as residential mobility, school demand, and school openings and closures. Schools experiencing the greatest gains in mid-year enrollment are those with higher proportions of students who are “at-risk” and those with disabilities—students whom DCPS has continually shortchanged year after year. ^[8]  Specifically, the data show:

• Approximately 38 percent of DCPS students overall attended two or more schools from the 2014-2015 to 2017-2018 school year for reasons outside of matriculation.^[9]
• During the same period, 45 percent of “at-risk” students and 44 percent of students with disabilities attended two or more schools for reasons outside of matriculation.
• Additionally, 44 percent of Black students attended two or more schools for reasons outside of matriculation—more than any other group.

Because mid-year enrollment fluctuations significantly impact the accuracy DCPS enrollment projections, these students will likely continue being shortchanged if their new schools are not properly supported through the Enrollment Reserve.

Policy Recommendations for Improved Transparency of the Enrollment Reserve

Greater enrollment fluctuations during the COVID-19 pandemic have illuminated and further reinforced the need for a more transparent Enrollment Reserve. Currently, the information publicly available regarding this fund is too opaque to fully understand its effectiveness and impact on the schools and students who may need it most. The public deserves to have a stake in assuring that mechanisms such as the Enrollment Reserve adequately and equitably enable schools to meet mid-year staffing needs, and how public officials are determining the annual allocation into this reserve. In particular, DCFPI urges DCPS to:

• Publish and describe in detail all allowable uses of Enrollment Reserve funding and the methodology that DCPS uses to estimate annual need.
• Annually publish accurate total approved Enrollment Reserve appropriations and actual funding amounts of the year prior to the DCPS Budget Data website.
• Publish all enrollment reserve reprogramming expenditures for each school year directly to the DCPS Budget Data website with the following information: the date of the distribution, the recipient school name, distribution amount, and position.
• Annually publish all Enrollment Reserve requests including: the date of the request, the requesting school, amount requested, and purpose of the reprogramming request.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify, I will be happy to answer any questions during the Q&A portion of this hearing.