After nine years, Miriam Goodman leaving to take similar position in hometown of Franklin

By JOSEPH B. NADEAU
 
WOONSOCKET — Although the local school district has faced significant challenges as one of the state’s distressed urban communities, Miriam Goodman has helped it make ends meet in her role as school department business manager for the past nine years.

That hasn’t always been easy as teacher layoff notices were sent out in the past and members of the school department’s staff didn’t know if they would be back in the coming year.
But somehow, over the time Goodman has held her post, the school department’s budget line has remained balanced even as the department found ways to recall staff while tapping savings from retirements and new sources of grant revenes, and completing creative adjustments to programs.
And that’s why members of the department were finding it hard to say goodbye to Goodman last week as she prepares to taken on a new job as school finance director for the town of Franklin, where she and her family reside.
Goodman will be making more money in her new post and will be working for the same district her daughters, Sarah, a sixth-grader, and Jenna, a second-grader, attend. She will also face new challenges while making the adjustment to the education funding system in Massachusetts, challenges she is looking forward to meeting.
Goodman is also leaving behind a lot of people who count on her work, and that was the part that was adding a taste of sadness to her upcoming departure April 18.
“I’m going to miss a lot of people here because they have been great,” she said. “My staff has been great to work with and I am going to really miss them,” she said. “All the school department’s directors and administrators have been great as well and they have all helped me in the past nine years to get to where I am,” she said.
While Goodman’s departure comes not long after School Superintendent Maureen Macera announced her intentions to retire in July, the business manager, who has been Macera’s unofficial deputy, said that was not her reason for leaving.
“I wasn’t even considering other employment and I wasn’t thinking about leaving Woonsocket at all,” she said. But then the Franklin post opened up with the departure of that department’s finance director, Dolores McCoy, and Goodman put an application in for the job.
“They called me in for an interview and then they called me for a second interview,” she said. “They offered me the job and I accepted,” she said.
The post will pay Goodman more than her local salary of $96,708, she said.
 While leaving the local district in the middle of its current budget process, Goodman said she and Macera have completed the department’s portion of preparation of next year’s budget and the remaining work will come as the City Council and the state finish their budget tasks sometime in June.
 The new budget may well have been Goodman’s most challenging, as Gov. Donald Carcieri called for level funding of state aid to school’s and that translated into a round of 99 layoff notices to teachers and another 14 to support personnel. The budget was prepared with the governor’s cuts in mind and with the layoffs sent out, would allow the reduction of art, music, library programs at the elementary schools, and special needs staffing other program reductions throughout the system.
 Macera asked the School Committee, however, to send the City Council a budget request of $68,709,374. That figure would require a $12.2 million contribution from the city, representing the full 5 percent increase allowed under the state’s property tax cap law, and an 11 percent increase in state aid, or $52.8 million, rather than the governor’s level-funded state award of $47.6 million next year.
 While Goodman doesn’t see the Governor making that kind of a change in his proposed state aid, she does believe there is a chance Macera and other urban district superintendents could be successful in securing more state funding from the General Assembly.
 Macera testified at the General Assembly last week on a plan to revise the state’s school funding system with a focus on providing support for the greater student needs urban districts address in their schools. The current formula gives all districts, poor urban communities and the wealthier suburban district’s the same percentage share of new state aid funds.
 “It would be a benefit to Woonsocket because we would see an additional $13 million in state aid,” Goodman said of the proposed formula change.
 For now, however, the final figures for next year’s budget remain a question mark and Goodman’s replacement will have to complete that process when the time comes.
 School Committee Chairman Marc A. Dubois said that concern was on the committee’s mind this week when it moved to advertise Goodman’s post immediately in the hopes of bring a new person on board in the near future.
The panel also hopes to take Goodman up on an offer help to out with the change to a new business manager.
“She’s offered to stay on part-time during the transition, which is very nice of her,” he said.
 The hard part, he added, is seeing Goodman go in the first place.
“We were very sad to lose her. She was excellent on the job and always helpful in answering the committee’s questions,” he said.
 “We are happy for her and understand she is taking a job closer to home with more money and we can appreciate why she is going. But we are also sad to see her go,” Dubois said.
The best indication of Goodman’s value to the school department are the balanced budgets she has helped run during her tenure, he said. Even this year, when the state and many communities are facing red ink in their end of year financial reports, Woonsocket finished the year with its final numbers in the black, he noted. “In the nine years she’s been here there’s never been a deficit,” he said.