Interim Superintendent Kathleen Smith and Assistant Superintendent Liam Hurley met with Fig City News to review two versions of the NPS budget for the next school year (FY24) — with and without the $4.5 million that would be provided by approval of the operating override proposed by the Mayor. Approval will be decided by voters in an election on March 14. Smith and Hurley made a presentation to the School Committee previewing these preliminary budgets on Monday evening. Hurley noted that these budgets are preliminary, having been prepared two months earlier than usual.
In developing the budgets, they started with a “goal” budget of $280-$282 million, which is designed to maintain services for the 2023-2024 academic year equivalent to this year. The goal budget would require an increase of 6.8% to 7.6% over the current year’s $262 million budget. Slide 19 of the presentation attributes about 2% of that increase to $5.1 million in expenses in line items with high inflation:
- Out-of-district tuition increasing by 14%: $1.8 million
- Health insurance increasing by 5%: $1.7 million
- Transportation increasing by 7%-10%: $0.5 million
- Gas and electric utilities increasing by 22%: $1.1 million
The goal budget also includes staffing and other resources that had been funded by “one-time money” (ARPA, CARES, and ESSER funds) to help school districts cope with the Covid pandemic. Smith noted that while activities in schools are returning to “school as we knew it [before the pandemic], we are clearly not out of the pandemic,” and those resources (math coaches, literacy coaches, support for social-emotional intervention) are still needed to respond to “loss of learning and emotional struggles coming out of the pandemic.” The NPS goal is to retain these resources while these pandemic-induced problems remain. (Separately, the current-year budget had a decrease of 17 staff that had been brought in to support hybrid learning specifically during the pandemic.)
NPS then prepared two budgets, both of which started with a normal 3.5% increase in the budget allocation from the City plus $2 million carried over from the NPS budget for the current fiscal year.
Budget #1, which includes the $4.5 million from the override, would be short of the goal budget by $2-$4 million. Smith and Hurley expect that gap to be filled by increasing student fees, reducing charter maintenance, adjusting assumptions about risk, and making further reductions in operational and educational areas without directly affecting classroom instruction.
Budget #2, which does not include the $4.5 million from the override, would be short $6-$8 million. They expect that budget will require more severe cuts, as outlined in slides 25-30 of the presentation:
- Non-personnel: Building maintenance, professional development, technology devices and software, non-core academic programs, contracted services
- Administration and operations: Administrators, support staff, bus routes
- Extracurricular activities: Athletics in grades 6-12, music, theater, and clubs and activities
- Classroom and school personnel: Larger class sizes and caseloads for social-emotional learning, mental health professionals, guidance counseling; wait-lists for high-school classes and electives, increased free blocks; reductions in academic and social-emotional support systems
Assistant Superintendent Hurley noted that a survey of 56 Massachusetts school budget officials revealed that the average increase in preliminary school budgets is 6% for next year. It is not clear how many of these preliminary budgets can be realized at that level of increase, however, given the constraints of Proposition 2.5. When asked to respond to voters who say that NPS should “stay within its budget,” Hurley noted that in his seven years with NPS, the district has always stayed within its budget allocation (typically increasing 3.5% each year), with only two overrides in the last 20 years, compared with many more overrides in neighboring communities during that time.
Interim Superintendent Smith acknowledged that for taxpayers “it’s a sacrifice during this time,” and she hopes that the electorate understands the school district’s cost drivers. She called Newton a “premier school district” that “needs this support,” and she pledged to be transparent throughout the budget process, both before and after the March 14 vote on the override. She emphasized that, based on her meetings with school parents across the city, she is “optimistic and hopeful” about the outcome for the next school year.
