City Budget implies "Not Enough Community After-School Spots" Saga will continue next academic year

This post is an update on my earlier post concerning DHSP's inability to provide ~500 afterschool spots to the families that need them, including 42 low-income students. 

I have 3 updates on this question. None of them is an answer. But they're what I've got, so I thought I'd share. They are:

1. Update from our talk with City Councilor Marc McGovern
2. Update within the new City Budget (released May 2 - see page 42 if you can't wait for my write-up)
3. Update on the City Manager search - which IMO is the crux of this whole thing + also a big part of why it's so unknowable.
4. Old news I should have shared earlier -- City Council passed 3 ordinances last Fall about DHSP. I didn't know about them when I wrote my Advocacy post, but they're really salient, so I'm posting about them now. 

PART I: The ordinances I should have written about before show it's all about a City Manager who cares. (This one doesn't.)

Thank you to one mom who called me to walk me through important history I left out of my Advocacy post. In that post, I discussed:

• a parent petition for more AfterSchool spots (Spring 2021).
• DHSP's 11-page, often hilariously honest report on its many failings with the Community School program. (Not online, naturally.) (October 2021.)
• a blog post by City Councilor Quinton Zondervan on his thoughts about AfterSchool expansion. (October 2021).

Well, what I left out was 3 strongly-worded (but apparently utterly meaningless) ordinances, all of which City Council passed unanimously in October 2021, under further pressure from parents, including at least one leader at the Cambridge Families of Color Coalition (emphasis added below):

• [1] The "all families who need it" order:
  • "That the City Manager be and hereby is requested to present a plan, which includes funding, and the findings of any feasibility study of any DHSP and any other city department providing children and/or city youth programs, for rapidly expanding out of school time in the city to create enough slots for all families who need it."
• [2] The Caregiver Advisory Council order: 
  • "That the City Manager be and hereby is requested to convene a Caregiver Advisory Council that is overly represented by high priority families in partnership with DHSP that engages key stakeholders that includes, but is not limited to, the Agenda for Children, current and former out of school time staff and leadership, and out of school time community benefit organizations. Such a council will receive reports as ordered by Policy Order 2021 #201 that describe who applied and were enrolled, capacity, staffing, and outreach efforts."
  • Note: "high priority" I think means "low-income" or maybe also low-income and POC. Not defined in the ordinance. 
• [3] The "Neighborhood Councils" order:
  • "That the City Manager be and hereby is requested to re-establish the Community School Neighborhood Councils, and to report back to the City Council on this effort before the close of this calendar year."

You might notice all 3 ordinances "request" the City Manager to do stuff. Emphasis on "request," because, as I've written before, the City Manager largely runs the show in Cambridge - not City Council. (Really!) 

Upshot: it seems like Louis DePasquale (our current, but soon-to-be retired City Manager) did not agree to take these up. At least, little seems to have happened. 

Digression to bash on DHSP just a little more: (So sorry DHSP), but what better place to share that, this March, City Council also unanimously passed this ordinance "requesting" (oh, damn! there's that word again) the City Manager to 

• "consult with the Assistant City Manager for the Department of Human Service Programs [Ellen Semenoff] and the head of DHSP Preschools [Meghan White]" when they 
• "make changes that can have undue impacts upon the families they serve."

I know about this because I worked with City Councilor Denise Simmons to get it passed and am only now understanding how useless it really was, but ... it felt good at the time. I guess.

[Back to actually relevant info.]

Part II: DHSP's City Councilor said that we should pressure Ellen Semenoff but kind of also need to wait for (and pressure) the new City Manager

Last Tuesday, May 3rd, City Councilor and liaison for DHSP Marc McGovern met with me and 4-5 parents who I recruited with some others mostly off of Facebook. A group of ~12 had informally gathered via email. Please email me [email protected] if you want to be in on any more shenanigans we get up to. This is a fully open group, if pretty inchoate. (Bias note: I know Marc from other work and am a big fan of him.)

[Take-away #1]: Marc will ask DHSP Head for information

• Marc agreed to follow up with Ellen Semenoff on the "all families who need it" policy order and get a sense of the numbers they'll accommodate in 2022-2023. 

[Take-away #2]: Marc will arrange a public meeting with DHSP Head

• Marc also agreed to arrange a public parent meeting with Semenoff, likely during the workday, likely in June. I'll share that once I know. 

Other thoughts:

• DHSP is a big department ... maybe too big. It might be right to push for Preschool/AfterSchool being split from unrelated departments like homelessness, veterans services, adult programing and more.  
• Keeping up pressure on new City Manager will matter for advocacy. (See more below, though). 
• However, Marc also shared that the City Manager will step down in Late June, but it's unknown when the new one will come in. Also, many department heads are expected to retire within the first year of the new City Manager, and it's implied that Ellen Semenoff is in that category. 

Part III: The City Budget implied expanding AfterSchool is not top priority

In this part, I paraphrase the recent Budget's page 42, aka "Key Initiatives: Out of School Time:"

• Para 1 - blame Covid: "DHSP programs lost approximately 40% of its staff during the 15-month [Covid] closure, which greatly impacted the ability to operate programs at the same capacity." [Note: silent on why they can't be rehired. Or have they been? It's unclear.]

• Para 2 - maybe we made mistakes?: "Prior to the pandemic, DHSP had begun to take a closer look at practices that may [no, definitely!] have led to inequitable enrollment patterns in many of its programs." [This sentence makes me so angry. Please read my advocacy post for more on how heads should have rolled for what DHSP did in the very recent past.]

• Para 3 - numbers: 

- It's not us! Massachusetts only serves 25% of families needing afterschool care [source not provided]. 
- "In Cambridge, City-operated and community-operated OST programs have capacity for approximately 40% of the JK-5th grade Cambridge Public Schools population."
- CPS has ~3,600 elementary students. 
- Before 2021-22, City programs had 1,100 afterschool seats + nonprofit programs had ~350. [Total of ~1,450.] [Does not say how many seats are available today.]
- "The pandemic seemed to increase the demand for afterschool programs." [But DHSP's report indicates that demand didn't so much increase as low-income families were fully shut-out of services they wanted - see that advocacy post I keep talking about.]
- Award for best use of passive voice: "The cost of programming and knowledge of programming options are often barriers to access for families. Additionally, staffing and space are major challenges that need to be solved."
- More editorializing: please say more on staffing and space, as we can solve this thing for everyone if we figure out these 2 pieces!

• Para 4 - We are punting this for at least another year: 

- "Providing additional afterschool programming requires a collective effort to determine a path forward." [Why does it require a "collective" effort? Just hire teachers and find spaces! Oh no! The second "stakeholders" they mention are "families/caregivers." But IMO caregivers should not have to work to solve this problem. People collecting City salaries should solve this probably all by themselves.]
- "AFCOST will lead this effort over the next fiscal year and work closely [obnoxiously pointing out a typo: missing "with"] stakeholders to map out a process to examine OST expansion opportunities for Cambridge." [This sounds like it's going to take a year to create a process to look at expansion + then another year to actually expand? It does not sound urgent.]

• Para 5 - We're doing a study 

- "The effort will require a capacity study to determine how many OST providers, programs, slots, and opportunities currently exist, and where there may be room for growth and expansion." [Don't we have this already?]
- "It will also involve input and feedback from families and caregivers about their needs for afterschool, as well as input about access and equity - with a focus on centering voices of the most traditionally marginalized residents." [Just guessing that families want quality childcare they can afford.]

Apologies for all the editorializing.

At any rate, it seems clear that speed is not the top priority in the City's budget. It seems like they're taking a year to study the issue. I don't think that's the same as a year to *solve* the issue, but I hope I'm wrong.

In terms of the upcoming meeting with Ellen Semenoff, I think focusing on this page of the City Budget will be important. Why does it seem like this is being punted for a year of study? Why can't we solve it sooner? Or are am I just misinterpreting?

Part III: New City Manager isn't coming for a while

My feeling on all of this is that things won't change until the new City Manager takes the job and replaces Ellen Semenoff with someone more attuned to the needs of families, particularly low-income ones.

Unfortunately, a Crimson article today on the City Manager search states that it's possible that "the selected candidate might not be ready to take over by June [when DePasquale is set to retire]" and so “We’ll have to make some kind of decision as to who’s running the show,” according to Marc McGovern. “Do we keep Louis on for a couple months? Do we appoint somebody else? That’s a whole other ball of wax we have to consider and think about.”

I think that's more bad news for getting this afterschool situation resolved sooner rather than later. 

Thoughts? Corrections? Suggestions? Please email me at [email protected].