School Poor: How We Got Here (MSBA Explained) and What It Tells Us

Lots of voters are confused about why Brookline ended up with such a low rate of aid from the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA). It’s important to understand, because the poor MSBA performance illustrates the poor process and decision making that led to a $212,000,000 Pierce project.

Here’s an analogy:

Your house hasn’t been well maintained and has a lot of issues. You decide to build a new house, and you’re going to dip into your savings and your three kids’ college funds to finance it.

Luckily, your generous Aunt Jennie says she’ll give you 35% of your costs – within reason. She’ll apply her gift to a house plan that has a reasonably-sized living room, dining room, kitchen, four bedrooms, and two baths, up to a $100,000 cap. A pretty good deal.

So you build a $100,000 house with that program, and you maximize the impact of Aunt Jennie’s gift. You get enough space for everyone, nice new everything, good windows, good systems, and you’re satisfied. Jennie gives you the $35,000 and you spend $65,000 of your own money (an amount you can manage).

Here, you’ve been fiscally responsible. You know you’ll have to spend money over time to maintain this nice new house, plus you have all the other costs of living: food, clothing, and keeping the lights on. This house isn’t the only thing in your world, so you fit it in appropriately.

On the other hand – If you decide to blow past Aunt Jennie’s guidance, and you design a house with ten bedrooms, six bathrooms, a grand terrazzo stairway in a double-height glass atrium, and a pool…well, you still only get 35% of the things Aunt Jennie said could be in the program. Because that was the deal.

She said she’d cover a reasonable plan: the amount of space she knows will meet your needs, without being extravagant. In other words, she’s still basing her 35% gift on the amount of space that accounts for the first $100,000 of your now much-larger plan. The extras? You’re on your own.

Now you have a $200,000 plan, but still that same $35,000 gift; this means you have to dip into the college fund for $165,000 instead of just $65,000. Plus, you’re going to use far more energy, and need to pay many more bills, and hire extra people to maintain this big fancy place. Those double height windows won’t wash themselves.

You can say it’s not fair because your brother got to build a big house last year; or it wouldn’t have cost this much before inflation; or it’s really only $150,000 if you don’t count the basement (nice try). But that doesn’t change the bottom line. This is either fiscally responsible and reasonable, or it’s not. And it’s not.

This is what we call house poor. People become house poor when their eyes are bigger than their wallets, and they make fiscally imprudent decisions. A great big house, but drowning in debt and unable to do anything else.

A municipality shouldn’t be house poor (or school poor) and should be fiscally prudent; leaders owe that to the public. The Pierce building committee could have brought us a plan that met our educational needs and had a substantial proportion covered by the state. Unfortunately, things went atmospheric. It’s a shame they didn’t give us something we could support. But we have a whole town full of needs out there, and a complex school system to operate. We’re already over half a billion dollars in debt, and residential property taxes have risen 36% in the past five years.

Needless overspending in one place does not make sense for anyone – or not for everyone may be more to the point – especially when it didn’t have to be this way.