NORTHAMPTON – City councilors declined to invoke a 1987 law at Thursday’s meeting that would grant them greater say in Northampton’s school budgeting process. The vote came after Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra unveiled her final draft of the city’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget, which allocates an additional $1.2 million to Northampton Public Schools — a figure that is still well below the demands of families, teachers, and students in the district.
So far, at least twenty Northampton School District employees have received pink slips and an additional twenty have received involuntary transfer notices due to cuts in the mayor’s previously proposed school budget — the result, the mayor and city councilors say, of using non-recurring revenues like federal pandemic aid to fund the schools. Many of those who were pink-slipped were employees in tiered support positions – positions based on intensity of student needs. Other positions facing layoffs were math and reading support intervention staff.
By 6:20 p.m., a crowd outside City Hall had grown to about 100 people, overflowing the concrete apron in front of City Hall onto Main Street, chanting “opt-in save our schools” and “opt-in kids first.” Kids as young as three years old were part of the protest cohort.
The legal statute referenced by the slogans would allow the city council to increase the amount of funding requested by the mayor for the city schools by a two-thirds majority vote. This measure, introduced by Ward 4 councilor Jeremy Dubs and Ward 3 councilor Quaverly Rothenberg, was previously discussed in the joint meeting of the finance and legislative matters committees on May 13, receiving a neutral recommendation from the legislative matters committee and a negative recommendation from finance. The measure was still brought forward for vote on the May 16 council agenda.
Sage Lamanna, a Northampton High School student, told The Shoestring ahead of the council meeting, “I hope these adults do their jobs and vote to opt-in for a level services budget.” Lamanna has been involved in organizing student lead protests of the proposed budget since December, including the NHS student walkout in April.
During the allotted hour and a half of public comment members of the Northampton Association of School Employees testified to their personal experience within the schools at their current staffing levels, and expressed extreme concerns around both student and staff safety at reduced staffing levels. One paraprofessional gave a tearful testimony that they would not be able to continue working in the Northampton district if staffing levels were decreased.
“I love my job… I do not want to quit my job but I can’t continue to do it if it is unsafe,” said Dory Graham.
Another staff member, Simone, a student-teacher in their third year at Jackson Street School, said that they often caught scissors and chairs flying through the air during their day and asked what would happen if they weren’t there to do that. Multiple staff members said that at current staffing levels they were struggling to cover lunch breaks and attend to students in crisis, often having to pull staff who were actively involved with other students to respond.
Many people raised economic concerns saying that struggling schools would continue to decrease student enrollment and dissuade migration of new residents into the city resulting in a deepening tax revenue and budgetary shortfall. Several parents and students who had moved from other states and countries testified that they were “shocked” after moving to the city for its progressive ideals and strong education system to discover a very different reality.
A handful of speakers voiced concern that any increase to the school budget would result in tax increases city residents could not afford, especially those on fixed or limited incomes. Others simply stated the city could not spend money they didn’t have.
City councilors and constituents debated whether or not the city had the extra money to spend. Council president Alex Jarrett said he was hesitant to touch city reserve funds in light of recent flooding of the Connecticut and Mill rivers and the current state of the city’s stormwater and wastewater infrastructure. Sciarra supported this stance saying that the city had been quite lucky during the previous flood season. She said the water systems had nearly reached their functional capacity during that time, narrowly avoiding catastrophic consequences by mere inches.
How these reserve funds came to be in place however, is also part of the debate. A coalition of unions and citizens pushing for increases to the proposed school budget have shared figures suggesting that the city has underestimated tax revenue by nearly $20 million since 2018.
“We’re not asking them to spend down all of their reserves, we’re not asking them to take from other departments,” Andrea Egitto, the president of the Northampton Association of School Employees, told The Shoestring. She said the group wanted the mayor to use the revenue the city had been “underestimating all along” and not “mindlessly” putting them into reserve funds where they can then say those funds aren’t meant for one-time expenditures.
The mayor’s budget presentation included an additional $1.2 million for the schools from fiscal stabilization funds on top of the original 4% proposed increase. Sciarra said she recommended this $1.2 million be rolled into the budget permanently going forward which would require a $3 million tax levy override and would increase taxes for city residents in fiscal year 2026. This override would need to be voted forward favorably by city residents in November. Failure to secure this override will result in more staffing cuts in fiscal year 2026 according to Sciarra.
Sciarra also said in addition to seeking state-level policy changes to address revenue shortfalls, she had been in conversation with Smith College president Sarah Willie-LeBreton who agreed to a $500,000 gift to the city over a two-year period and to “re-evaluate” Smith’s relationship to the city and the taxes paid by the institution.
The mayor’s budget presentation was met with mixed feelings by city councilors. Ward 7 councilor Rachel Maiore voiced frustration over receiving the budget on the same day as the council meeting, raising the issue that councilors could not meaningfully participate in a budget conversation with the mayor as a result of the timing. Sciarra responded that this was “the date it was due.” Jarrett asked that next year the mayor look ahead to the schedule and work with the council to move the meeting based on when the budget would be made available to them to prevent the two things from coinciding on the same date.
During the budget discussion, city finance director Charlene Nardi claimed that every year the city was asking every department across the city to “do more with less.” Last year however the Northampton police department’s budget increase created space for three new officers to join the department. The NPD’s 2025 budget, excluding grants and other revenue sources, is nearly $6.5 million, a 2.3% increase over the previous year – excluding a 3.91% increase to parking enforcement and a 3.2% increase to the public safety communications center.
Three years after the city’s ad-hoc policing review commission, of which current council president Jarret was a member, recommended “reducing the footprint” of policing in Northampton, the city does not appear on track to do so.Sciarra’s budget says “the (police) department anticipates that overtime costs will continue to be high” and the department is still seeing an overall increase in the personnel services budget of the NPD “due to contractually agreed upon pay raises.” The 2025 NPD budgeted staff includes $245,380 budgeting for three currently vacant positions, one of which is for a Captain level position accounting for $133,794 of that funding number.
One department that will be reducing its footprint in the coming year will be Public Works. Sciarra applauded the Department of Public Works for keeping their budget increase to only 1%, in part by not funding open vacancies and “temporary scaling back capital maintenance lines.” The DPW has faced many vacancies since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been using engineering staff to fill vacancies in snow removal positions during the winter season.
Ultimately the council moved the mayor’s proposed budget forward to the finance committee, which will hold public hearings for the general budget on May 29.
The meeting concluded with the council vote on order 24.064 brought forward by councilors Jeremy Dubs and Quaverly Rothenberg “to accept the provisions of chapter 329 of the acts of 1987” which would give the city council the power to increase the school budget — normally, city council can only cut money from the mayor’s proposed budget
Councilors had spirited conversation around adopting the measure and possible consequences to the city. Rothenberg, Maiore, and Dubs all voiced support for the measure saying to them it appeared to be a democratic safeguard and would allow for more elected officials to critically evaluate the school budget. These councilors also said they felt it was unrealistic to expect one person, in this case the mayor, to take on the sole responsibility of this budget evaluation process.
All noted that voting to opt-in would not only be applicable to this budget session but would be a recurring tool available to the council giving them and their constituents more power in the school budget process.
Maoire also claimed responsibility for her role in the current school budget deficit the city is facing, acknowledging that she had voted forward the use of one-time funds in the previous fiscal year without fully committing to creating a plan to avoid landing here. She said this situation was untenable and that “this is why we need to opt-in, to share responsibility.” She added that she couldn’t understand why they would not take this option and how the council would explain this decision to constituents.
“What do we say? That we are afraid of our own power?”
Jarrett expressed he was open to discussion about opting-in but said he did not know if he himself knew all the legal strings attached to the funding tools available. He said he was not sure he could utilize these tools in the short time frame needed to address the current budget situation.
Councilors Marrisa Elkins, Garrick Perry, Debbie Pastrich-Klemer, and Stan Moulten all voiced similar opinions – that they would not be able to address overall budgeting problems with the schools in a sustainable way in the time available to them.
Despite describing this proposed budget as “bad” and “terrible” and unlike any other she had seen before in her long tenure on the city council, Ward 6 councilor Marianne LaBarge also raised concerns about adopting the measure. Larbarge ultimately said she did not want “the exception” to become “the routine” and said she would not vote to opt-in.
At 11:35pm, five hours after the meeting began, councilors voted on the order. The measure did not pass, with three members voting in favor and six against.
Barbra Madeloni, a Northampton educator and former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association who was instrumental in the rank-and-file labor movement within the MTA, attended the protest leading up to the city council meeting and shared her views with The Shoestring.
“I think what we have discovered during this process is how undemocratic this process really is, and how much power is concentrated on the mayor.”
Madeloni said unless the mayor decides to do something, it’s not going to happen no matter who else is contesting her. In this case that even includes the school committee’s input on the school budget. She also said there needed to be more solid revenue predictions.
“If you’re off by millions of dollars you’re not actually serving the city. A core duty and function of a city government is to provide high quality education which includes paraprofessional and educational support staff.”
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Tommy Lee is a writer, investigative journalist, and audio video producer for community television based in Western Massachusetts.
