The April 4 School Committee meeting contained only two significant agenda items: approval of the Fiscal Year 2025 budget for Newton Public Schools (NPS) and discussion of busing services provided to some Newton private-school students. Superintendent Anna Nolin began the meeting with her regular Superintendent’s update, which included acknowledging feedback from the public to take steps to ensure a teacher’s strike “never happens again,” and she described ongoing meetings that the NPS administration has been having with educators to understand each others’ perspectives.
The 2025 NPS budget passed unanimously by a 9-0 vote after very brief discussion and no public comments, with many School Committee members remarking how comparatively few emails and questions from constituents they had received about the budget, relative to prior years. Committee Member Anping Shen (Ward 3) applauded the budget’s “focus on mental health, academic achievement, and STEM curriculum.”
After the budget vote, the Committee engaged in a substantive discussion regarding whether the NPS district should continue to provide busing services to students attending private schools in Newton. According to a memorandum authored by the NPS Office Business, Finance, and Planning, in the current academic year NPS provided five morning buses and six afternoon buses to accommodate 131 private-school students. The Committee elected to delay any change in policy, if one occurs, until the 2025-2026 school year, and indicated any changes for that year would be determined by October 2024 to allow families time to plan for any changes.
The April 9 meeting of the School Committee was fairly brief, beginning at 5:30PM and ending shortly after 6:30 due to a conflict referenced by several participants. This April 9 meeting was originally anticipated to be the final vote to approve next year’s budget, but that approval had occurred ahead of schedule, in the April 4 meeting. One notable item in the April 9 meeting was the unanimous vote to adopt a resolution acknowledging the work of the Understanding Our Differences (UOD) program in NPS over the previous decades, and thanking its volunteers. The UOD program in NPS concluded in the 2022-2023 school year. The resolution was authored by Committee Member Emily Prenner (Vice Chair, Ward 5).
The April 4 and April 9 meeting replays are both available on NewTV.