College of Management Lends Expertise to City of Lowell's School System

J. Stephen Collins

When the Lowell School Committee wanted to encourage employees to come up with money-saving ideas, it turned to experts from the College of Management for help.

Profs. J. Stephen Collins and Stuart Freedman served on a panel convened by the School Committee and its community partnership and finance subcommittee in June to brainstorm about how to create an incentive system to reward school department employees for their cost-saving suggestions. Representatives of the Lowell Plan and Middlesex Community College also participated.

The move to find ways to save the school system money and boost morale is the initiative of School Committee member Dave Conway, who wants to establish the Council for Creative Solutions to evaluate suggestions for cost savings from employees and pass the best along to the full School Committee. In exchange for suggestions that get implemented, employees would receive a bonus.

“In my opinion, it’s a good idea to look for ways to save money in an organization as large as a city school system,” says Collins, an associate professor of accounting.

Looking within the organization is a good approach because employees know firsthand how the organization works, according to Freedman, a management professor and chair of the department.

Although similar incentive programs have been used successfully in private industry, applying it to the public sector presents some challenges, such as determining whether implementing cost-saving suggestions would require collective bargaining, if it is appropriate to pay such a bonus out of public funds and which employees would be eligible to participate. Collins says some school department employees may already be tasked with finding cost savings as part of their job.

Lowell City Solicitor Christine O’Connor is preparing a report for the School Committee on the issues. Among the possibilities for the program that are under discussion would be expanding it to include students as well as employees, and using private donations or gift cards for the incentives.

Stuart Freedman