Superintendent Floats Budget Cuts for Northampton Schools

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NORTHAMPTON — The city’s public schools are facing the possibility of layoffs after the superintendent put forward a proposed budget for next fiscal year with a $2.7 million deficit.

During a School Committee meeting last Thursday, school Superintendent Portia Bonner presented a “first-view budget” for fiscal year 2025 that requested $40.8 million from the city. That represents a nearly 8% increase from the previous year. But Bonner said that level of funding would still result in a budget gap for several reasons: federal COVID-19 funding will end this year, the district overused school-choice money in recent years and drained that account, and a new collective bargaining agreement has boosted pay for educators.

“We are making a concerted effort to keep within the two-year plan to work to balance the school budget and return Northampton Public Schools to strong fiscal principles as promised to the city,” Bonner explained. “To meet this promise, we must consider reductions within the workforce and rebuild the school choice reserves.”

The meeting drew a strong presence from members of the Northampton Association of School Employees — the union representing all faculty and staff. Holding signs that said everything from “fund our schools” to “we are all essential,” union members expressed frustration with the proposed budget and its implications for education in Northampton.

During the public-comment period, NASE President Andrea Egitto said that the city’s schools “can’t possibly survive these cuts.” She said students are barely getting by with the support they have currently. High school class sizes are already upwards of 30 students, she said, and elementary special education teachers fill “every moment of their day” complying with legally-binding individualized education programs, or IEPs.

The budget proposal will now head to the School Committee’s Budget and Property Subcommittee, which will be tasked with finalizing it before it heads back to the full School Committee for a vote.

“Every single person is working their tails off, every minute of every day,” Egitto said. “Come and see, you’re all welcome to come and see. If the city can have the money to start new departments, new stability funds, then you have the money to fully fund our schools.”

In her presentation, Bonner pointed to an increase in staffing since 2018 — when the district moved to a new special-education inclusion model — the new union contract, and pandemic-related stressors as reasons for the fiscal challenges. The district, she said, had been relying on non-recurring revenue to pay those salaries: money from students using school choice to attend Northampton schools from outside the district. Over time, the district spent down that school-choice account, she said.

The district had also relied on federal COVID-19 funds to pay the salaries of a math interventionist, reading interventionist, math coach and five education support professionals. All of those positions except the ESPs are now eliminated, Bonner said. 

In past budget messages, Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra, who chairs the School Committee, has expressed concern about the reliance on school-choice revenue and the looming fiscal cliff that was coming with the sunsetting of federal coronavirus funding. After agreeing last year to steer $1.2 million from the city’s fiscal stability fund to the schools, she said those funds would “allow for decreased reductions this year” through attrition. 

“There will need to be additional reductions next year as the last of [federal coronavirus] funds will have been expended, and the hope is that with smart management it can also be done by attribution,” she wrote at the time.

Several School Committee members spoke up in favor of the new union contract the district and NASE agreed to last year, which included big pay increases for the district’s lowest-paid workers such as paraprofessionals and cafeteria workers. Ward 3 School Committee Member Emily Serafy-Cox, who led negotiations on behalf of the body, said that a primary goal in the contract was to retain quality faculty and staff in the district “during a time when people were leaving education in droves.”

“This can’t stand,” Serafy-Cox said. “We can’t move forward with these numbers. Our schools are not going to be the same place if we move forward with these numbers.”

Michael Stein, who represents Ward 4, said that in the past the district made the numbers work by underpaying educators and that the new contract finally took a step toward addressing that. He said that the district adopted the new model of mainstreaming special-education students in 2018, which required a lot more staff, but that nobody in school leadership ever added those costs into the yearly appropriation from the city. Instead, he said, school officials balanced the books with school-choice money.

“The structural problem that has produced this is underfunding the schools for a number of years because no one built those costs into the yearly appropriation,” he said. “That’s why we’re having such a problem.”

Several School Committee members said that the federal government and state were not giving the district the funding that it needed. Bonner noted that the district received only the minimum increase from the state this year.

Ward 1 School Committee Member Meg Robbins, who was attending her last meeting after being drawn into another district and losing a three-way race for two at-large seats on the body, said that the city and School Committee have to come up with a different approach that involves more collaboration. 

“This is not school district vs city,” she said. “This is the city. The children under our care are as important as any of the other workers or any of the people that we fund through appropriations from whatever revenue that we have that comes in through the city.”

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Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dustyc123.

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