For the past few months two members of the Community Finance Committee (CFC) for Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 took a deep dive into OPRF’s spending and staffing, comparing it to benchmarks set by the state’s evidence-based funding model.
Their conclusion? Priorities should be changed in some areas.
“Overall investment is high but the structure is not optimal,” said Michelle Mangan, a CFC member who was instrumental in implementing the state’s evidence- based funding model, in presenting the report to the OPRF school at the April 30 Board of Education meeting school board meeting.
Mangan, who has a background in higher education and research, and former Oak Park Elementary School District 97 school board member Bob Spatz spent months preparing the report.
The evidence-based funding model is based on 34 factors and provides a guide to how much schools should be spending, overall and in specific areas, and how staff should be allocated, to achieve the best educational outcomes.
Former OPRF and River Forest District 90 school board member Ralph Martire was the leading force behind the development and adoption of the funding model in Illinois but Mangan did much of the work in implementing the model in Illinois and in some other states. The model is a guide not a straightjacket; and in Illinois is based on a 600-student high school with numbers extrapolated for a much larger school like OPRF.
The report noted that OPRF’s overall spending is 137 percent of the amount the model deems adequate for a school the size of OPRF. But just spending money is not enough, Mangan said.
“More spending does not necessarily translate to better outcomes,” Mangan said. “It’s how you deploy your resources.”
Mangan and Spatz’s report concluded that OPRF spends more than is recommended on some things such as security and some administrative and student supports but not enough on professional development for teachers and high impact tutoring for struggling students.
“The internal alignment is off,” Mangan told the school board. “We’re overinvested in the non-instructional roles and we’re underinvested in instructional supports. This means that resources are not always aligned by areas with the strongest instructional impact.”
The report concluded that OPRF is currently overinvesting in supervisory aides, mostly security guards, school site staff, often clerical positions such as department secretaries, assessments, central office staff, employee benefits and maintenance and operations while it is underinvesting in interventionists, tutoring, specialized supports and instructional materials.
It also concludes that OPRF is overinvested in certain pupil supports such as non-certified aides and special education staffing but underinvested in extended day services and summer school. It recommends having more teacher interventionists to help at-risk students.
“Fiscal decisions become equity decisions when resource allocation determines which students receive the strongest instructional support,” Mangan told the school board.
The report concludes that OPRF has more than double the recommended number of supervisory aides, most security guards, and nearly double the recommended number of school site staff, such as secretaries, but is seriously understaffed in core intervention teachers, instructional facilitators, library aides and librarians.
The report suggests that the school aim to increase by five percent the overall number of students meeting academic growth targets in reading as measured by the PSAT/SAT including increasing the number of Black students meeting the growth targets by five percent and the number of Hispanic students meeting growth targets by seven percent.
In math, it recommends setting a goal of increasing the number of students meeting growth targets by two percent overall but by 10 percent among Black students and four percent among Hispanic students.
To achieve these goals the report suggests that more teacher tutors are needed. The analysis concluded that OPRF overuses non-certified instructional assistants, which research does not show is effective, and is understaffed in instructional facilitators, core intervention teachers and tutors, at risk extended day teachers and teachers and staff for students whose primary language is not English.
OPRF is planning to implement a new instructional coaching model next year after ditching its previous instructional coaching program after analysis showed it made no measurable impact on student academic achievement.
School board members generally welcomed the report but noted that OPRF has special characteristics, including the sheer size of the school building, that makes a slavish devotion to the EBF model inappropriate.
“EBF is far from perfect,” said school board member Graham Brisben. “It’s a blunt instrument.”
Nevertheless, Brisben, who along with Kathleen Odell, is a board liaison to the CFC, has been a strong proponent of increasing tutoring at OPRF in an effort to reduce the gap in academic performance between Black and white students and to help struggling students and supported that recommendation in the report.
Board members Tim Brandhorst and Josh Gertz said that they were not in favor of any cutbacks in security staffing at OPRF.
“I’ve been asked by parents more questions about school safety and is my kid safe here and is this a safe place by students than every other issue combined,” Brandhorst said. “So I think there is a real concern that we provide a safe learning space for our students.”
The report was presented on the same day that multiple fights broke out at OPRF and Mangan, who is the mother of two OPRF students, and Spatz acknowledged the concern about safety and the size of the building.
Long time board member Fred Arkin welcomed the deep dive into spending and staffing at OPRF saying it would take some time to digest.
“This is something we really haven’t seen before,” Arkin said.
District 200 superintendent Greg Johnson said that the report gives the administration a lot to think about.
“We have to figure out how we’re going to make use of this report,” Johnson said.
Johnson also said that he doubted that any other school in the state has taken such a deep dive into how the evidence based funding model applies to its school.
Mangan and Spatz acknowledged that local context can justify deviations from the evidence-based funding model and that local priorities necessitate flexibility in spending decisions that are the school board’s responsibility to make. But they said that the report offers insight into how OPRF can and should spend its money and allocate its staff. They said that it is up to the school board to decide how closely they want the school’s spending and staffing to mirror the evidence based funding model.
“Where you spend your money are your values, even if you don’t say it out loud,” Mangan said. “The question is whether we are allocating resources in ways that are both fiscally sustainable and instructionally effective.”