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"Budget panel backs COMPASS"
Gloucester Daily Times June 20, 2005, page one
Colin Steele, Staff Writer
The City Council's Budget and Finance Committee has moved to save the COMPASS program, but not everybody is happy about it.
The committee voted to recommend taking $24,000 from the school budget to pay for COMPASS, an alternative educational program for Gloucester High School students run by Action Inc. The School Committee had been funding the program but cut it from this year's $32.1 million budget.
William Rochford, executive director of Action, was "quite pleased" to learn of the proposal, he said.
"I thought (the money) was going to materialize, but I didn't know how or when," he said.
However, School Committee Chairman Jonathan Pope said the proposal oversteps the City Council's bounds.
"I don't think they can take the money and appropriate it somewhere where they have no capacity to do so," he said.
In past cases where the City Council wanted to fund items the School Committee had eliminated, the council added extra money into the school budget. This time, however, some councilors did not think the School Committee would use the extra money to pay for COMPASS, Councilor-at-large Abdullah Khambaty said.
"The school system had already decided to cut it, so therefore we had to find some other way," said Khambaty, chairman of the Budget and Finance Committee. "Suppose the council gave money back to the schools. That doesn't mean they would use it for what it was supposed to be."
The City Council does not have the power to reduce specific line items in the school budget. Funding COMPASS through the city budget is the only way to make sure the program gets its money, Khambaty said.
"Most of us thought that COMPASS should be supported," he said.
COMPASS tutors students who feel alienated from the high school. Its 11 seniors this year all graduated. Many are planning to attend college and one earned a full four-year scholarship to a state school. All five of last year's seniors graduated, with four going on to college and one enlisting in the military.
COMPASS stands for "Creativity, Opportunity, Motivation, Principles, Authenticity, Self-Esteem, Self-Sufficiency."
The School Committee's $24,000 funded two part-time tutors. Action, Inc. had secured $137,000 from other sources to pay for the rest of the program's costs. It does not matter to Action if the money comes from the city instead of the schools, Rochford said.
The School Committee decreased its COMPASS funding "because we were taking money out of everywhere, and there wasn't a good understanding (of it)," Pope said. At first he did not realize the program assisted students enrolled at Gloucester High School.
"If we don't use COMPASS ... we would still have our obligation to provide services to those students," Pope said. "And it would probably be a lot more expensive to do it any other way."
The Budget and Finance Committee did not take a formal vote on its proposal Wednesday night, but in moving the money from the school budget to the city's and then voting for the final assembly, it effectively formalized the shift.
"It was a pretty bizarre meeting," Pope said.
Also at the meeting, committee members said they would put a proposed $200,000 increase in state education aid into the city's budget, not the School Committee's. The money would make up for other uncertain revenues on the city side of the budget, they said.
But Pope cautioned the extra state aid is no more dependable, because the Legislature has not approved it yet.
"In the past we've been burned by using state numbers at this point in the game," he said. It showed "pretty odd logic" for the committee to use one uncertain revenue source to replace other uncertain revenues, he said.
During its budget process, the School Committee urged the public to lobby the state, not the city, for more money.
"It turns out the issue is the city, that they're taking the money," Pope said.
It will be difficult to successfully lobby the state for more education money if the city is going to keep that money from going to the School Department, Pope said.
"It just sends the wrong message across the board," he added. "And it's not even being used to help the community. I think it's a power play. I don't know what it's a power play for."
The Building and Finance Committee meets today to make formal recommendations to the City Council, which finalizes the budget Wednesday.
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For related articles:
Compass program a success Gloucester Daily Times 5/27/05
Tutor program in need of assistance Gloucester Daily Times 5/13/05
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