To begin the April 27 School Committee meeting, two Bigelow Middle School educators were among the public comment speakers to advocate for staff restoration to address the middle school team sizes.
Superintendent Kathy Smith followed the public comment period by giving her scheduled update, during which she congratulated the central administrative staff for attending a training, and acknowledged the anniversary of the Oak Hill Middle School bus crash, which took the lives for four students in 2001.
Following a consent agenda, a presentation on social-emotional learning (SEL) was given by elementary SEL coordinator Jesse Krotick and elementary SEL coach Maria Kolbe. Mr. Krotick and Ms. Koble reviewed the SEL framework used in NPS, the amount of SEL human resources, and quantitative measures they use to evaluate success.
After the SEL presentation, Assistant Superintendent for Business & Finance Liam Hurley and his staff presented the most recent NPS budget information. Mr. Hurley indicated that NPS was on track, though not certain, to end the current academic year (FY23) with approximately $2.2 million budgeted but unspent funds. $2.0 million of this carryforward was already assumed to be available in the FY24 budget proposal, which was reduced from $271.8 million to $268.6 million as a result of the School Committee voting to accept Mayor Fuller’s proposal on April 25 to move the Other Post-Employment Benefits (OPEB) line-item from the NPS budget to the City budget.
At that point, the NPS administration addressed items that could be added back to the FY24 NPS budget that were previously cut. Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Education Toby Romer responded to a request made by Kathy Shields (Ward 7) during the April 25 School Committee meeting to detail the effect of more funding allocated to Newton’s middle schools. He reviewed how the restoration of Priority Restoration List #2 middle school items would add 6.5 FTE teachers. These additional educators to would reduce the number of “half-team” middle school groups. This restoration would be funded by increased student fees, cutting 2.0 counseling FTEs, and using surplus one-time funds from FY23.
Ms. Shields then put forth a motion to approve the NPS budget with Restoration List #1, but not List #2, citing the negative effects of the cost-cutting measures cited above to fund the List #2 items, as well as the limited evidence that half-team, two-teacher middle school cohorts were inferior to full-team cohorts. Restoration List #1 includes FTE teacher positions to lower class sizes across elementary and middle schools, funding for the elementary strings program, and a placeholder line-item for disability inclusion programming.
The final vote was 8-1 to approve the budget motion put forth by Ms. Shields, with Chris Brezski (Ward 2) the lone dissenter. Mr. Brezski’s comments during the debate indicated that his No vote was due to the Restoration List #2 not being included in the final version.
Elementary parent Patrick Cheng, an organizer of the Save our Strings advocacy effort, told Fig City News, “The best thing that came out of the Save Newton Strings effort is that those NPS students and musicians representing every one of our schools in that performance before the School Committee learned at an early age what a difference they can make by working together. Newton at its best was on display that day.”
Video of the meeting is available on NewTV. The budget discussion begins at approximately 1:08:00.
