Robert Cushman is a resident of Warwick and holds a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) from Bryant University. He possesses over forty years of experience working as an IT professional, including early roles as a programmer, systems analyst, and later in his career as a Business Analyst. His professional work includes serving Fortune 100 companies and working as an independent consultant in the financial, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors across New England.
Mr. Cushman was elected to the Warwick School Committee in 2003, serving until the end of 2006, and held the position of Warwick School Committee Chairman. He served on the Warwick City Council from 2007 to 2008, during which time he was a member of the Finance Committee and other committees.
Mr. Cushman has amassed a large database of information consisting of official city and school budget documents spanning from 2003 to the present day. This approximate two decades worth of information allows for analysis focused on long-term trends. He has conducted extensive financial analysis and has publicly presented his findings before the Warwick City Council, the Warwick School Committee, and the RI General Assembly committees.
His insight into explaining city and school financial problems allows him to identify the origins of the crisis. Mayors, city councils, school committees, and superintendents typically craft budgets using only the past few years of data, not realizing, or ignoring developing spending and revenue trends. Mr. Cushman's approach offers a “long-term prospective” that elected bodies do not have making it possible to trace the systemic failures and compounding costs over time.
The long-term data set covers the exact period during which the Warwick School Department fiscal crisis was developing, a crisis that Mr. Cushman had previously forecasted. Twenty years ago, Mr. Cushman predicted the fiscal crisis that would eventually develop. This prediction was based on the failure to implement two key structural changes: City legacy cost spending reform and School downsizing.
His analysis demonstrates exactly how the lack of reform in these two areas has created the long-term trends that culminated in the present crisis for the school department and the inevitable crisis that will soon develop on the city side. The 20 years of data effectively provides the evidence trail proving why the predicted crisis—now manifest in the 2025 school department budget crisis—was inevitable given the continuation of these unchecked trends.