HANSON – Now begins the work of meeting the W-H Regional School District’s operational assessment in the wake of the second failure to pass an override – at Town Meeting on May 6 and at the ballot box Saturday, May 18.
A funding gap of $372,141 remains.
The Select Board on Tuesday, May 21, met with Superintendent of Schools Jeff Szymaniak in an effort to better understand what drives rising school budget costs and what the defeat of the override will mean for Hanson’s finances.
Now that the ballot question failed on Saturday [see related story], the Select Board discussed what comes next since the “override question is dead,” she said.
“That’s one path that’s been eliminated from the map,” she said of the override. “Now what we have before us is a question of how do we fund that delta between what we had budgeted for and what the school [operational] assessment was. … We’re in the same position we were in without any method of paying that difference.”
Select Board member Joe Weeks asked for a bumper-sticker view of what the current budget situation would mean to the district’s schools.
“If I don’t have a budget in place by July 1, the commissioner of education takes over and I have no say in what he decides on giving us,” Szymaniak said. “It can be even to fiscal 2024, or he could decide it could be more.”
What the bumper-sticker would say is: pink slips for staff, according to Szymaniak
“The challenge is, once you get a pink slip, you don’t have a job and you qualify for unemployment,” he said. “On July 1, if those are 60 folks, they will qualify for unemployment until I can give them a contract, and I can’t give them a contract until I have a certified budget.”
Szymaniak said the district is OK until July in paying teachers according to their contract.
“It gets a little gray by August if I don’t have a budget,” Szymaniak. “The day that a teacher doesn’t have a contract, they’re eligible for 40 percent of their salary going forward. Some would call that double-dipping because they’ve already gotten paid.”
The district had challenged the practice during COVID, but lost.
“We learned a lot during that time-frame just because of that situation,” he said.
Where things stand
Town Meeting voters were told at the May 6 Town Meeting that balancing the municipal budget was dependent on the $372,141 increase for the W-H operating assessment being “expressly contingent upon passage” of a proposition 2 ½ question on the May 18 ballot.
This time at Town Meeting, the question will be structures such that there will be two options – voting no and voting to fund the difference with various budget cuts the Select Board will explain, according to Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett. At that time, voters will be provided a line-by-line look at what the board has voted.
On Tuesday, May 14, she had advised the board that “there’s only so many things we can do to fund this budget,” while ticking off the options. They remain: drastic across-the-board cuts; funding some of the gap with free cash and make modest cuts at Town Hall and other departments; fund a bit more with free cash and make; use of free cash and more drastic cuts; free cash or even more drastic cuts or just cuts.
The Finance Committee has not yet voted on the new warrant article being drafted for the June 17 Town Meeting, FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
“Again, saying no is not an option,” she said. “We have to present some option to Town Meeting, or de facto that assessment is in place and we just don’t have a method anyone’s voted on to pay it.”
In fact, Hanson’s available free cash is $627,000. “To pay $350,000 for the assessment would perilous,” FitzGerald-Kemmett May 14.
Town Accountant Eric Kinsherf has cautioned that “It would be irresponsible” to balance the budget with free cash now.
Kinsherf, Town Administrator Lisa Green and the Finance Committee are all looking at whether there are open positions that the town should not fill right now or positions where hours can be trimmed back without drastically impacting services.
FitzGerald-Kemmett also put to rest – again – the rumor that the town has $1.4 million in free cash.
“We do not,” she said. “We have roughly $600,000 in cash.”
Kinsherf and Green are also meeting with department heads, considering options including whether it could be a lot of little cuts that could fill in that dollar amount.
“Some of it may be free cash, but we’re going to use as little free cash as we possibly can,” she said.
The board will be meeting again on Tuesday, May 28 to review and sign that warrant then.
It has been considered whether the meeting could be made to the high school…. but that option in recent years was permitted by the state because of COVID and may not be available again.
In the past, when a high turnout was anticipated at town meetings at Hanson Middle School, the gym or cafeteria had been configured to handle overflow crowd with a TV screen for people to follow the meeting and a teller to track questions and votes.
“We were caught flat-footed at the last Town Meeting,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “We didn’t anticipate that number of people and we need to do better.”
The town is planning on having the meeting at Hanson Middle School, but having the gymnasium in place with plenty of printed materials available for voters.
Budget craft
School budget is based on an estimate of funds the district expects to be refunded by the state.
“Every year, it’s a bit of a crap-shoot,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “It’s the best guess that the School Department can do.”
This year the important funds the budget was based on was $30 per-pupil reimbursement and a 74 percent reimbursement on busing. But right now, both the House and Senate on Beacon Hill have increased those numbers to $104 for per-pupil costs with an 84 percent transportation reimbursement. Those two budget bills translate to a $190,00 in state funds.
“However, that is not a sure thing,” she said, calling on Szymaniak. “It’s not on lockdown and it probably won’t be until mid-July.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett said the clock on the wall should make town and school officials look at the timing of everything.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get to a point where we could have Town Meeting so late that we’d know [the state budget] numbers,” she said. “But there’s got to be a better way of doing this.”
“We don’t have those numbers, but they look encouraging,” Szymaniak said. “Last year, we expected a little bit more and when the budget came in on Aug. 5 with less, so we had to make cuts on the fly.” The state is asking the towns to pick up more funds and the towns say they can’t, he said.
“If they came back with $300,000 more in [reimbursements], we wouldn’t be here,” he said.
Those cuts amounted to $250,000 in personnel cuts.
There are two bills, with some teeth to them, on state Sen. Mike Brady’s desk to increase regional transportation and special education 100 percent, he said, urging people to call Brady and other state senators to support them.
“Regional transportation and special education reimbursement are the core of our funding,” he said. “If we can get more from the state, it will help us out.”
But there are four or five more conference committees to go through plus objections before it goes to the governor’s desk, Szymaniak added.
“There’s no way that we could time a super Town Meeting before July 1 at which point, you must go into the 1/12 budget,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
Ed Heal asked how the public could get salary information, to which Szymaniak said teachers are listed by unit salaries in Town Report. Complete budget information is available at whrsd.org.
“We’re looking at cutting staff also,” said Select Board Vice Chair Ann Rein. “It seems to me the School Committee needs to look at that themselves and not try to force us to go onto this fiscal cliff every year.”
Later in the meeting, Weeks also requested more meetings — joint sessions with the School Committee — be added to the Select Board’s schedule with the specific intention of making formal requests of the School Committee.
“We all know this isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and we had discussed last year being more diligent about being more transparent about having these financial meetings,” he said. “It’s really hard to put somebody on the spot when we didn’t provide them with an agenda, we didn’t provide them any materials to get ready. They weren’t here for this.”
Weeks said that kind of scenario can lead to people putting their foot in their mouth or promising something off-the-cuff that they cannot keep.
“Everybody here has had questions they’ve been asking to cameras and they haven’t had the ability — quite frankly, we haven’t done a forma request … and then we can have our questions answered.
FitzGerald-Kemmett said it makes sense for January or February.
“What’s stopping us from having a meeting in a couple of weeks that the superintendent was asked on the fly?” Weeks said.
Rein said it makes more sense to get throught the special Town Meeting first.
Member David George said he primarily wants to speak with the Hanson School Committee members about their support for the budget because he is still looking for an answer as to why 31 staff members were added with one-time money.
“I think you have to meet all of them,” Rein said.
“I don’t know the ask,” Heal said.
Weeks said he envisions a joint meeting with Whitman Select Board and the School Committee several times during the budget season.
George said he doesn’t see why it wouldn’t help just to get the Hanson members of the School Committee at Select Board meetings to ask the questions people have.
“We’re not asking them to make decisions or change anything, we just have some questions that we need answered,” he said.