TO GAIN some understanding of the city school system's budget crisis, it's useful to read a typical "procurement agenda," in this case the one from a school board meeting Oct. 22.

That night, the board routinely approved 10 professional services contracts, worth $571,000, and 16 goods and services contracts, worth $4 million. Among the expenditures approved: $64,000 to a recruiter of school psychologists and social workers, $70,500 to the Johns Hopkins University for a principal-mentoring program, $67,500 to members of the Notre Dame Mission Volunteer-AmeriCorps Program and $52,000 to evaluate the results of a school system marketing campaign.

Such services compose a small part of the system's $913 million budget. Salaries take up 80 percent of the total. But the system spends millions to keep the system up and running. At that meeting Oct. 22, for example, the board approved $1.1 million for painting, $99,999 for the installation of folding partitions, $123,000 for elevator maintenance, $17,448.60 for printing bus tickets and $19,962.75 for furnishing the suite of Chief Executive Officer Carmen V. Russo.

The items demonstrate the budgetary breadth of Baltimore's largest public employer. At any one time, the city is juggling numerous balls. It has nearly 200 buildings and 12,000 employees, 6,000 of whom are teachers.

Take away teacher salaries, and you see that the city doesn't spend much directly on education. It spends millions, as one example, on legal services, paperwork and bureaucratic busywork to comply with court orders in the 18-year-old special-education lawsuit known as Vaughn G. (A recent study said the system wastes $14 million a year in the effort.)

The last major round of school building was 30 years ago. Those schools are increasingly expensive to maintain.

And because it's a charitable agency, the system must spend millions on welfare services that aren't directly educational. Some kids, for example, get 2 1/2 meals a day: breakfast, lunch and after-school snacks.

The system spends $250,000 a year on ice cream, $54,192 to conduct criminal background checks.

Now we're told that officials have discovered a budget deficit. It could be $20 million, 2.2 percent of the budget. It could be higher. No one seems to know for sure, but nearly 400 temporary employees have been sent pink slips just days before Christmas. Full-time employees might be next.

Something is clearly wrong here, and Ronnyjane Goldsmith thinks she knows what it is. Goldsmith reviewed the district's budget on the Internet last week, and then the former number-cruncher for the Baltimore City Council wrote a letter to Mayor Martin O'Malley.

The problem, she said, is that in the current budget, there's no comparison with actual revenue or expenditures in the past two years. Actual is the operative word. "Year after year," she wrote, "budgets have been based on and compared to prior year budgets that do not reflect the revenue or the expenditures actually made. By doing this, deficits are compounded year after year, and the only outcome is disaster."

Goldsmith, who told me she has "saved" several municipalities by correcting similar budgeting deficiencies, recommended that Baltimore add two columns to its budget to represent actual income and spending for at least two prior years.

Budget crises certainly aren't new to Baltimore. In my three decades here, the system has been in a state of perpetual emergency. Layoffs haven't been that common, but threats of layoffs have been. Recall former Superintendent Walter G. Amprey's "Memorial Day Massacre" in 1994? The school chief sent a letter over the holiday to all 10,000 employees, warning them of widespread layoffs and reassignments.

Nothing came of that threat. Let's hope this mess can be straightened out without further damage.

Research notes success of some school reform

Research conducted by the Johns Hopkins University shows that so-called schoolwide reform models such as Towson-based Success For All are better than the status quo in raising student achievement.

The Hopkins researchers conducted what is called a meta-analysis, evaluating 800 studies of the most widely used comprehensive reform models -- those that attempt to change nearly all aspects of a school's operation.

Three models were found to be particularly effective: Success For All, which was developed at Hopkins but now operates independently; Direct Instruction, a scripted program in wide use in Baltimore; and the Comer School Development Program.