Last week, Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee offered up their FY 2009 schools budget, which at $773 million, is about $23 million less than the current year’s budget. However, because of savings from the scheduled closures of under-enrolled campuses and recent mass firings from the DCPS central office (about $44 million) ,as well as the shifting of special education responsibilities to the Office of the State Superintendent ($231 million), the budget actually increases the amount allocated for schools, from about $493 million to $537 million.

The extra cash is being invested in art and music instruction, and universal pre-K programs for the District. “There’s an 89 percent increase in art teachers; 135 social workers will be in our schools, as opposed to 26 in ’08,” new DCPS CFO Noah Wepman told the Post. “We’re putting more money into programs that students and parents want — like high-tech schools and more preschool.”

Speaking of Wepman, the Post’s D.C. Wire blog has more on the tumultuous politics behind his appointment after Pamela Graham, the former CFO, resigned earlier this month.

Want to see how it all breaks down? The CFO’s office has a school-by-school chart outlining just how much is slated to go to each campus, a figure determined mostly by projected enrollment. Not to be outdone, those inexhaustible “reform advocates,” a group of D.C. residents who have been largely critical of the budget process from the start, quickly scheduled an April 2 meeting at Florida Avenue Baptist Church to air complaints about the perceived lack of transparency in the budget development, and press parents to lobby the D.C. Council for more funds for their individual schools.