CRANSTON –– Every school district has its share of active parents.

There are the moms who volunteer for the parent-teacher organization, the dads who show up at every basketball game.

And then there is Steven Bloom.

Chalk it up to a masochistic streak or an admirable sense of civic duty, but the businessman and father of three has spent the last few months poring through reams of budget documents.

And in recent weeks, Bloom, 46, has produced something remarkable: his own detailed, $234-million city budget, with $6.25 million more for the beleaguered Cranston schools than the spending plan proposed by Mayor Michael T. Napolitano.

All that, he says, and he still has time to serve as Cubmaster for his sons’ Cub Scout pack.

“I feel I have the responsibility to [get involved] — I have the education, I have the background, I have the responsibility as a citizen,” he said, explaining his budget work.

“I know it sounds trite,” he added, “but it’s the truth.”

Whether Bloom’s alternate budget, which is about $2 million larger than the mayor’s $231.9-million spending plan, will have much of an impact is an open question.

At the center of his plan, after all, is a 3 percent property tax hike that could prove toxic for a mayor and City Council facing reelection in the fall.

But his budget and an accompanying analysis of long-term municipal spending trends seem to be having at least a modest effect.

Bloom’s research figured prominently in a school district presentation before the City Council’s Finance Committee last week.

The goal: persuade the council to pour more cash into a school system projecting a $7.4-million shortfall for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

And he met with three City Council members — Jeffrey P. Barone, Paula B. McFarland and Anthony J. Lupino — on Saturday to discuss his ideas.

Barone, the lone Republican on the City Council, said he had “never, ever” seen a citizen put so much work into a budget analysis.

And like Bloom, Barone said, he believes the cash-strapped schools need a multimillion-dollar infusion.

“It’s something that I’m looking at,” Barone said, of Bloom’s proposal. “I might implement a few of his amendments.”

Bloom, who runs a business out of his home providing equipment to the power-generation, specialty chemical and water treatment industries, is a relative newcomer to local politics.

The Glencoe, Ill., native, who has a master’s degree in accounting from the University of Michigan, got involved when Cranston school officials made a controversial push to shift the system’s sixth-graders from the middle to the elementary schools this fall.

When it became clear that the move was just the first of many cost-saving schemes that could affect his children’s education, he began to delve more deeply into a schools budget long criticized as impenetrable.

The citywide, $234-million spending plan he eventually produced included the 3 percent tax hike and spending cuts for several city departments –– the city clerk’s office, the Parks and Recreation Department and the Police Department, to name a few.

Bloom insists that the tax increase, however distasteful, is necessary if the city is to keep pace with rising salary, health insurance and pension costs and adequately support education.

“If people think 3 percent is unreasonable,” he said, “what do you think is going to happen next year?”

Steve Stycos, a School Committee member who is urging the council to consider a tax increase, credits Bloom with jump-starting a conversation on the politically unpopular proposal.

And McFarland, the City Council vice president, says Bloom’s analysis helped confirm her own evolving belief that a modest tax increase might be preferable, in the long run, to Napolitano’s plans to dip into the city’s reserves to the tune of $2.7 million.

Ernest J. Carlucci, the mayor’s director of administration, acknowledged that there was something to Bloom’s insistence that a tax hike could be unavoidable in the coming years.

But he also offered up an argument sure to resonate with voters in tough times –– an argument that could derail the best-laid plans of a businessman with an ambitious plan to reshape the city’s budget.

“The people,” he said, “have been overtaxed.”

dscharfe@projo.com