NORTHAMPTON — Amid a growing debate over Northampton’s school budget, the city’s school superintendent is drawing criticism from some after she revealed a committee tasked with planning the future of Northampton’s schools that includes only one teacher.
In an announcement Thursday, Superintendent Portia Bonner unveiled 19 members of a strategic-planning committee that will create a five-year plan to “re-envision” the city’s schools. But although Bonner said that the team was pulled from “key constituencies,” critics of the committee have questioned some of Bonner’s choices. The head of the city’s chamber of commerce, for example, was included, but only one teacher and no paraeducators were on the list.
That drew criticism from the labor union representing Northampton’s school employees.
“We would have hoped that the committee would have been formed by putting it out to all stakeholders — a general request could have gone to staff members, care givers, the School Committee, the City Council, to ask who is interested in being a part of this important process,” Andrea Egitto, the president of the Northampton Association of School Employees, said in an interview last week. “This committee is clearly one that is based in city leadership and the opportunity wasn’t given to everyone.”
In an emailed statement, Bonner said that she asked “many teachers” to participate but that only one committed. She said she asked NASE about participants and that “even now, the invitation is open.”
But Egitto challenged that, saying that the superintendent asked teachers to participate only after the committee had already held their first meeting, where they created a community survey that will guide much of their work.
“Many feel insulted to be asked after the process has already started,” she said, noting that other staffers — from paraeducators to custodians — were also left off the committee.
The dust-up comes after Bonner, in December, put forward a budget proposal for next fiscal year with a $2.7 million deficit, which would result in layoffs across the district. The “fiscal cliff” the district is facing, she said, is because of the end of federal COVID-19 funding this year, drained school-choice accounts that the city overused in recent years to plug budget gaps, and a new collective bargaining agreement increasing pay for school employees.
Then, at a joint meeting of the School Committee and City Council late last month, Sciarra said she would only support a 4% increase to the school budget as opposed to the 8% increase Bonner’s “first-view” budget proposed. That combined with keeping increases to other city budgets to 2.5% would still leave a $700,000 budget gap, which she said the city could plug with money from its fiscal stabilization fund before requiring a $2.5 million tax override the following fiscal year. (A tax override is when a community votes whether to raise property taxes more than the automatic annual 2.5% increase.)
The goal, Sciarra has said, is to bring the school department’s budget back in line with a fiscal stability plan the city created in 2014. Sciarra said that plan calls for periodic tax overrides every four or five years, with stabilization funds used not to pay recurring expenses like salaries but to “allow sustainable and consistent increases annually to maintain services and avoid the roller coaster of cuts.” Sciarra used $1.2 million from the fiscal stability fund to plug a deficit in the school budget last year, but warned that using those one-time funds for recurring expenses automatically creates a hole in the next year’s budget.
“In the not-so-distant past, we’ve needed to draw from them because of an economic crisis,” she said of the stabilization funds. And with state revenues dropping this year, she warned that the city may see a drop in school funding from the state next year. “Using reserves is not going to solve a budget deficit.”
Sciarra did not respond to an email last week requesting an interview for this article.
The grim financial picture Sciarra presented, and the large job cuts it would require, seems to be setting up a battle over the school budget and overall city budget within the School Committee and City Council. At last month’s meeting of both bodies, some elected officials praised the mayor’s fiscal responsibility while others challenged her plans and questioned why the city hasn’t fully funded staffing decisions the district made years prior.
It is amid that fiscal uncertainty and simmering debate that Bonner announced the makeup of the strategic-planning committee.
In addition to Bonner and Sciarra, the committee includes the principals of Leeds Elementary School and the city’s middle school and high school, two administrators from the NPS central offices, and the district’s early-childhood coordinator. It also includes three city department heads: the directors of the Climate Action and Project Administration, the Office of Planning & Sustainability, and the Central Services Department. Two parents of NPS students are on the committee: Samantha Hopper, a Northampton Education Foundation board member and an ally of Sciarra, and former School Committee member Roni Gold.
Two elected officials are on the committee, both of whom were supporters of the mayor during her election campaign: At-large School Committee member Gwen Agna, who retired as the Jackson Street Elementary School principal in 2020 after decades working in various roles across the district, and At-large City Councilor Marissa Elkins.
Other city residents on the committee include Vince Jackson, the executive director of the Greater Northampton Chamber of Commerce, and Lynn Dole, a longtime western Mass educator and the current coordinator of teacher education at Smith College. Jennifer Sanders James, another Northampton Education Foundation board member, is also part of the committee.
Susan Sullivan, a teacher at Northampton High School, is the only teacher on the committee.
In a statement to The Shoestring, Bonner said that the committee’s strategic plan will help the district address big concerns: declining enrollment, academic achievement, diversity in staffing and retention, equity and inclusion, sustainability of facilities, and budgeting.
“It can help us pivot from increased spending to more fiscally responsible spending through defined actions that address rising costs necessary to support schools,” Bonner said.
As for the composition of the committee, Bonner said most strategic-planning teams are “limited to a small group of individuals” like the superintendent, a school committee member, principals, a teacher, the director of special education, director of curriculum and instruction, the English-language/family-engagement director, and a parent. For this committee, Bonner said, she “wanted to branch out to constituents that can help us with this work.”
However, NASE leadership and others took issue with the limited slice of Northampton the group was pulled from.
“I wasn’t consulted ahead of time and I’m happy that there’s one teacher on there, but I would like to see the committee be more balanced,” Egitto said, pushing back on the superintendent’s suggestion that the union was adequately engaged. She said she wished the committee featured “different caregivers from different community bases, or a variety of caregivers, not what appears to be a privileged selection.”
Ward 4 School Committee Michael Stein told The Shoestring that he wished the committee had members representing the special education parent advisory council, English-language learners, rank-and-file employees in the schools, students, and a broader range of caregivers.
“I’m concerned that the composition from the committee is not representative of the district or the community, and the consequence of this will be that important perspectives won’t be included in the planning process and won’t have a seat at the table shaping that process,” he said.
The president and vice president of the City Council, which approved $30,000 for the committee, said that a general request didn’t go out to the City Council for members interested in joining the committee.
“I think everyone was very excited for this conversation to start,” Council Vice President Rachel Maiore, who represents Ward 7, told The Shoestring. “But I don’t think it’s off to a great start, to be honest, because there’s so much confusion around this process.”
The strategic-planning committee’s work will guide the district’s priorities and actions over the next five years, Bonner said in a press release. Her office issued the press release about the committee after The Shoestring asked for a list of members and after the group had already begun meeting. It appears that the group is meeting behind closed doors, as no agenda was posted for its previous meeting.
Bonner said the planning team will synthesize feedback taken from a community-wide survey that staff, community members, caregivers, and students can fill out during February.
The recommendations that the committee’s work will be guiding are going to set the stage for decisions that will impact the district for years to come.
Agna, the at-large School Committee member who is on the strategic-planning committee, said that one of those issues will be the state mandate to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. She said Northampton has already moved away from truly neighborhood-based schools, given that many students attend schools across the city, and that other nearby cities and towns have recently built bigger, more consolidated school buildings. That’s something Northampton has to consider, she said.
“I think given a very careful presentation that shows what we will gain from a new building, whether it’s one or two, I think it will convince many people that they want their kids to be in a beautiful building,” she said. Currently, she said, the district’s buildings aren’t that way, suffering from poor air quality and other issues.
Agna said that the district has long known some of its current challenges would come, especially declining enrollment due to changing demographics and other factors. She said she saw them herself during her years as an educator. There were 450 students at Jackson Street Elementary when she started there in 1996, she pointed out. State data show there are now 276 students enrolled there.
But now, Agna said she’s worried that the realities of budget challenges might pit the schools and their advocates against other important city departments, with the City Council and mayor ultimately deciding how to balance the budget and where to make cuts. A big part of the conversation, she said, will be the use of fiscal stabilization funds, whose existence helps the city keep a good bond rating to get low-interest loans but that some may feel should be used to provide more funding to the schools.
That debate seems to have already begun in the School Committee and City Council.
In last month’s meeting between the two bodies, Stein said that although the mayor supports a fiscal-stability plan that includes balancing the school budget within two years, neither the City Council nor School Committee ever voted to approve those plans.
Stein also laid blame at the feet of previous school and city leaders who adopted a new model of mainstreaming special-education students in 2018, but never added the costs of the increased staffing that plan required into the yearly appropriation from the city. Those salaries, he said, almost exactly match the current budget deficit.
“We committed to a program and we didn’t fund it,” Stein said. Now, he said, the city has to decide whether to commit to funding those positions or cutting around 20 jobs.
Others, however, were supportive of the mayor’s plans.
Elkins, the at-large councilor who is on the strategic-planning committee, disputed the notion that nobody but the mayor approved the city’s fiscal stability plans. She said that voters approved those plans when they voted for city officials who had run on continuing them, including herself.
“We made promises to the voters and those were key to that,” she said. “We were going to keep the promises to spend this carefully and thoughtfully and make this money last as long as we could before going back to the voters again.”
Elkins praised the mayor’s office and elected officials “for doing the things that we need to do to make the hard choices” amid the reality that no major increase in state funding is incoming and that the district isn’t going to reverse its charter-school deficit overnight. The city, she said, has to “live with these realities.”
“None of us like, sometimes, the things we have to do but this is what we’re gathered here to do and what we said we would do for the voters, is to think about the hard things,” Elkins said.
The School Committee has until April 16 to submit its budget to the mayor. The City Council then has until June 30 to make its own decisions on the entire city budget for the coming fiscal year.
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 or on Instagram @dustycreports.
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