Every spring, Newport runs the same play. The school department projects a deficit. The city council expresses concern. Eventually, a one-time payment closes the gap. And then residents — reasonably enough, looking only at the last act — conclude the schools can’t manage money.
But the crisis isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system.
Under Rhode Island law, school districts can’t raise their own revenue — they depend almost entirely on the city’s annual appropriation. State law also requires that whatever the city gives the schools becomes the permanent floor going forward. That second rule creates a powerful incentive for any council: keep the recurring base as low as possible, and handle shortfalls with one-time cash, which doesn’t compound. That’s rational for the city’s books. It also guarantees the deficit returns next year, because one-time payments don’t solve a structural problem; they reproduce it.
The numbers, drawn from budget coverage in Newport This Week and What’s Up Newp, show what a low base does over time. Annual appropriations have lagged inflation for years, while costs the district cannot control have exploded: special education services rose from $9.3 million to $12.7 million just since 2022. Enrollment fell 13 percent over the decade — but students with individualized education plans rose 25 percent, and multilingual learners more than tripled. As the superintendent has noted, two high-need students can cost more than a classroom of twenty-five.
Has the district made mistakes? Yes. Spending one-time pandemic funds on recurring salary costs, as some school committee members have criticized, made the structural hole harder to see. But the district has also cut, hard: last year it eliminated 40 positions, including 18 teachers, under a 10 percent across-the-board staffing reduction. This is not an organization refusing to economize.
Meanwhile, the city has one of the lowest residential property tax rates in Rhode Island and an unassigned surplus of more than $30 million. The schools’ surplus is about $500,000. The schools’ share of the city budget — under one-third — is among the lowest ratios in the state.
So when the council votes an emergency payment and someone calls it a bailout, notice what happened: the city chose a funding structure that makes annual rescue payments inevitable, and then the rescue payments become the evidence against the schools. It’s a closed loop. Even the state auditor general has now written to both bodies telling them to solve this together.
The question for Newport isn’t “why do the schools keep needing bailouts?” It’s “why do we keep funding them at a level where bailouts are the plan?”
-Keith Grove
