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head Katherine Craven.
Katherine Craven is all about the numbers. On a yellow legal pad page, the head of the Massachusetts School Building Authority jots down “1983–2003” and, beside that, “$20 billion,” for the amount cities and towns spent on building schools over two decades. She circles “$11 billion” for the debt the agency inherited from the old Department of Education building program for more than 1,000 projects. “My one talent in life is a memory,” she says, smiling.
As Craven diagrams the MSBA’s fiscal pressures, it’s clear that she brings both passion and a dazzling grasp of facts and figures to a herculean task, riding herd on school building assistance in the Bay State. But as an agent of change, she has her work cut out for her.
In school building BC — Before Craven — the mindset in cities and towns was simple. Get on the state education department’s waiting list for funding, build the school, (municipalities borrowed 100 percent of the construction costs), then wait, up to 15 years in some cases, until the state could pay for its share of the grant reimbursements. Payments were generous, as much as 90 percent for projects related to desegregation plans. There was one catch, though. The state did not have a pot of money for the school construction that it committed to fund each year. Allocations for those projects were based on the annual increases to the education department’s budget.
In short, the state paid its share of reimbursable costs exclusively through general operating funds. But the education department neither tracked the added costs of wait-listed projects nor audited the projects it reimbursed. To make matters worse, as communities sought additional state aid to build schools after Proposition 2 1/2 slashed their ability to fund projects, the state’s tab for school construction exploded. Massachusetts would have eventually defaulted on its liabilities to cities and towns, Craven believes, if state leaders hadn’t agreed by 2000 to corral the budget buster.
“It was crazy,” says Thomas Finneran, the WRKO radio talk show host who served as House speaker and the chamber’s top budget official. “There was no incentive for any kind of budgetary discipline at the local level.”
In 1994, Finneran hired Craven, fresh out of Harvard, to work for him at the House Ways and Means Committee as a budget analyst. Finneran says the job generally becomes too much for people somewhere between their second and fourth annual budgets, but Craven didn’t burn out. She soldiered on, becoming, in her words, “the go-to gal” for the nitty-gritty details about the problem children of state government: Medicaid, the MBTA, and the school building assistance program.
Working her way up the legislative food chain to director of policy for the speaker, Craven helped draft the state’s new policies covering school construction. In 2004, she started carrying out those new policies as the first executive director of the school building authority.
She faced two challenges. The first was to replace a demand-driven funding program with a competitive process for limited dollars. The second was to reshape the muncipalities’ sense of entitlement about school facilities by forcing them to think differently about construction priorities and costs.
Austerity is now the name of the game. A four-year moratorium on new projects allowed the authority to begin to pay down existing debt and adjust to life on a fiscal diet pegged at a fifth of the revenue from the state sales tax. Right now the agency is guaranteed $702 million a year, but a year from now the guarantee will disappear and the authority will receive its share of whatever revenue the sales tax actually generates.
To adjust to this new spending reality, Craven is capping how much money her agency makes available annually for future school construction projects. The current cap is $500 million.
With a limited amount of money available, Craven is working with communities to start prioritizing their spending needs. It’s a big adjustment for municipalities. No longer will Massachusetts rebuild an otherwise functional school because it is no longer aesthetically pleasing. Nor will state officials give into a community’s “school envy,” wanting a new building because another neighborhood or nearby town has one.
To move into the agency’s new capital pipeline, a district must now demonstrate that a project addresses a specific problem, such as health and safety issues or severe overcrowding. For example, Quincy’s Central Middle School, an 1894 facility labeled “medieval” by architects, recently advanced to the next phase of the multi-step process.
With school enrollments expected to decline across the state, Craven’s agency is developing a model for forecasting school-age populations by town. Her staff is also reviewing the physical condition of schools. In a recent survey, nearly 2,000 schools received rankings ranging from 1 (good) to 4 (poor). Nearly 80 percent ranked in the top category, with less than 3 percent, or 62 schools, in dire straits.
The agency’s survey found no correlation between town wealth and school condition, the most surprising finding for Craven. Buildings that need major work include the Bedford, Wellesley, and Concord-Carlisle high schools. Applications for state assistance from those well-off communities are treated the same as those from less affluent New Bedford, which has more than a dozen buildings in poor shape. “Right now, the question is who is the neediest in terms of their physical buildings, not who is the neediest in terms of dollars,” Craven says. (Poorer districts do receive higher reimbursements than wealthier ones.)
The application process for funds is much more rigorous, a change that cities and towns are only beginning to appreciate. When the authority lifted its building moratorium last year, it was inundated with more than 400 funding requests. At press time, however, only 86 of those had moved forward. “That’s a huge culture change,” Craven says. “I’m not sure that every community realizes this.”
To get communities to focus like a laser, the agency is insisting on one project per district. On a rainy Friday morning in March, Pittsfield found out the hard way that the state has no intention of backing down from that posture. During their meeting with Craven’s agency in downtown Boston, city officials put on the table a $65,000 “visioning study” of options to replace its two aging high schools, but the only project scheduled for review was the Crosby Elementary School. Pittsfield officials were told they would have to re-apply for the high schools: The city couldn’t swap out the elementary school for the high schools.
That “black and white” regulatory reality did not sit well with Mayor James Ruberto, who had called the high schools a top priority. Speaking at the March meeting, he said state officials ought to see the shades of gray when they look at communities’ needs. “We’re walking away with the wind knocked out of us,” echoed outgoing Pittsfield Superintendent Katherine Darlington.
Although Craven may amend her stance, she suggests that most communities can only manage one project at a time. For Exhibit A, take Newton. When the four-year moratorium ended, Newton submitted 17 new funding requests for its middle and elementary schools. However, as far as the MSBA is concerned, other Newton projects will have to take a number until the city deals with its most ambitious (some would say infamous) project.
What started out as a $39 million renovation of Newton North High School has ballooned into a $198 million project. There’s been plenty of back and forth between city and state officials about the project, one that got the go-ahead under the old school building program, and state officials are willing to help the city find ways to manage costs. But with nearly $47 million already committed, Craven won’t be forking over any more money. If the school were coming into the program now, the MSBA would be wrestling with every detail on the design, she says.
What Craven brings to the program is discipline and stability, says Finneran. He says communities need to understand that they don’t have a blank check, and he thinks school designs should be standardized to reduce costs. “There should be an operable set of blueprints that are as functional in, let’s say, Boston, as they would in Pittsfield, and as functional in Pittsfield as they might be in Provincetown,” he says. “You don’t need 351 dreamers, designers, architects, and engineers trying to build their own version of the Taj Mahal.”
Mandated by the Legislature to investigate “prototypical” designs, the authority does provide space guidelines based on standard school models that it has developed with assistance from superintendents and others. But an “off the shelf” design hasn’t yet been developed, according to Craven, although that could be an option down the road if labor, material, and other variable costs become unaffordable.
What fuels the Boston native’s passion? A strong work ethic often begins at home. In her public service family tree are her late grandmother (and namesake), a Boston city councilor from 1963 to 1967, and her father, John Craven, a retired Boston Juvenile Court judge. While many of her peers went into consulting, investment banking and the like, Craven, who also manages the state’s cash flow as a deputy treasurer, saw an opportunity to make an immediate difference in people’s lives at a young age.
Now 35, Craven doesn’t intend to repeat past mistakes. “If we can’t rebuild every school in the state, maybe we can rebuild every science lab in the state in a way that’s creative, that no one has thought of before because everyone’s been focused on getting to the top of the list,” she says. “That’s the culture that I’m trying to walk away from.”
