Within some 26 hours Monday and Tuesday, April 8 and 9, the School Committee certified a $62,930,345 compromise budget that includes some contract non-renewals, retirements, and $250,000 taken from excess and deficiency as well as using $100,000 in Circuit Breaker funds to close the budget gap. Then Whitman and Hanson officials then moved to fill the rest of the budget gap with override questions at town meetings and on the May annual town election ballots.
The two select boards met Tuesday, April 9, with Whitman Select Board planning to meet again today [April 11] on the matter. Voters in each community will take it from there next month.
The scenario was one of the budget-trimming proposals Superintendent of Schools Jeff Szymaniak had put before the School Committee last month.
“We’re not asking for an 11 percent increase here,” Chair Beth Stafford said in her board’s meeting on Monday, April 8. “The 11 percent is the assessment, not the budget increase.”
Stafford added that the assessment to towns increased because the state did not provide the district the increase that they should have.
“It was a very low increase – $100,000 doesn’t go very far, as you know,” she said.
The School Committee voted 9-0 to approve the compromise, which would increase the operating budget by 4.04 percent. David Forth was absent from the meeting.
“Instead of being well over $1 million for both towns, if we kept the assessment as it is, it would be down to about $509,212 for Whitman and [$372,141 for Hanson],” Stafford said. “In looking at their towns, [the officials] felt those would have a better chance at passing because it would be a smaller amount. … We know it’s a Band-Aid. I know the towns are thinking about larger overrides or doing something else, we can also look at other things we can do [in the future].”
Hanson’s override would ask the voters to support a $372,141 or 2.68 percent over the 5 percent that town’s officials had indicated was feasible, and Whitman’s override would be $509,212 or 3.87 percent over the 5-percent assessment increase town officials had planned for. The Hanson Select Board voted 4-1 – member Ed Heal was unable to attend because he was traveling – to place the article and ballot question but voted to refer the issue to Town Meeting rather than make a recommendation one way or the other.
“It’s their tax money,” Hanson Select Board Vice Chair Joe Weeks said. “I want them to figure out what is the best use of their tax money. I refuse to cut any operating jobs, positions or line items to fund this. … I don’t think we should be influencing them in any way.”
Hanson’s 7.68-percent assessment increase represents $14,974,736. Based on the average home assessed value of $470,190 in fiscal 2024, Whitman taxpayers would see an annual tax increase of $95.38, according to Carter.
Hanson taxpayer would see an annual increase of $94.98 annually based on an average home assessed value of about $499,000 in fiscal 2024 to fund the override there. Hanson has plotted out the tax impact for a range of home values on the town website, hanson-ma.gov.
The original assessment increase for Whitman had been 11.3 percent and Hanson’s had been close to 10.2 percent.
The Whitman Select Board, meeting the same night, heard Town Administrator Mary Beth Carter announce that the board would meet virtually at 12:30 p.m., today [Thursday, April 11] to vote on the question pertaining to the override article being placed on Whitman’s Town Meeting warrant and on the Town Election ballot. Whitman’s 7.787 percent assessment total is $19,135,687.
Whitman FinComm opposes move
The Whitman Finance Committee, also meeting Tuesday, unanimously voted not to support the school budget as Chair Rick Anderson termed it a lose-lose proposition for the schools.
“They came down a little over $900,000,” said Hanson Select Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett during her board’s meeting Tuesday night. She repeated Szymaniak’s admonition that the budget would not negatively affect educational outcomes, but that they “needed to dig in in the interest of trying to meet everybody halfway.”
“It’s not our job to vote the assessment or even approve the assessment that is handed to us by the School Committee,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “But we do need to decide how we fund it, if voters want to do that. … This [budget scenario] was always on the table.”
She noted that the board had not wanted to make dire cuts to town personnel, so in order to do that, they have been talking about an override that is specifically for the schools, presenting it in the warrant as 5 percent being what the town can afford, and the budget for the schools would include an override.
“I don’t think anyone is leaving feeling victorious, but I do think it’s definitely better than it was a week ago.
Stafford outlined the meeting she and Superintendent of Schools Jeff Szymaniak had on Monday, April 1 with town administrators Mary Beth Carter of Whitman and Lisa Green of Hanson as well as select board chairs Laura FitzGerald Kemmett of Hanson and Dr. Carl Kowalski of Whitman.
“It was a good meeting,” Stafford said of the meeting with administrators and select board chairs. “It went about an hour and a half, almost. I do want to say they were not trying to micromanage us. They were not putting us down. They were understanding of what our concerns were, too.”
She said that she and Szymaniak felt the session was “very collaborative” and that the group tried to come up with something that would work, hopefully, but that such an outcome would depend on what the School Committee decided.
“I would like to remind the board, because some people have said we are going backwards, that we haven’t progressed, that we haven’t had any new progress,” Stafford said. “And I want to remind everybody that we certainly have. We’ve seen that in the last couple of months with all the data on the students’ progress alone. We’ve advanced, we’ve come forward.”
Stafford also emphasized that the district has, in fact come forward with new programs, such as Innovation Pathways to prepare students for the outside world in the medical and health as well as business fields. The district has also added curriculum for grades one through 10.
“What I’m going to suggest does not impact any student growth and it, hopefully, might be the best way of getting through this year,” Stafford said. “We have talked with them about more conversations forward with the town, too, and things that they have decided that they need to do, but we all know is that one of the main problems is the state.”
The district received “a little over $100,000” from the state for fiscal 2025, Stafford said, adding that representatives in the General Court must do more. She also reminded the public that the district is like it’s own municipality, with it’s own health insurance, maintenance and facilities costs – as any community does.
“We knew both sides couldn’t do much of anything without an override,” she said. “The issue was, if we’re going to do an override – what size?”
Budget impact on learning
“This was a level-service budget,” Stafford said. “This did not include anything else.”
Szymaniak had presented the different budget tiers and the assessment costs they carried last month. The tier voted on Monday was the first on that list, which gave back about $900,000 and calls for not filling non-renewals of some contracts and retirements.
“These positions would not affect student scores, would not affect the young students’ class sizes that everybody was so concerned about,” Stafford said. “It would be a loss of positions, but positions that Jeff felt could be absorbed.”
Stafford also alluded to questions from the public on whether the interventionists hired to help students transition back to classrooms after the isolation and remote learning during the COVID pandemic were necessary.
“I think that everybody could see that the interventionists made a difference,” she said. “All our scores went up and they continue to go up. That would put us backwards if we couldn’t have them anymore.”
Residents have also questioned recent hires.
Seven of the positions recently filled by the school district are now required by the state, including English Language Learners (ELL) teachers or tutors and the district also has to retain E&D and Circuit Breaker funds for midyear special education student enrollments or placements.
School Committee Vice Chair Christopher Scriven said Monday that he was interested in hearing what some of the discussions held during the meeting with town officials on April 1 about the future.
“How does this not put us right back in the same position next year?” he asked. “I’m curious to know what, if any, plans are in the works for the future?”
Stafford said Hanson Town Administrator Lisa Green has discussed her town’s consideration of a $5 million operational override next year as recommended by their Madden Report. While Carter has not specifically stated her town’s plan, there is also “discussion ongoing with them.”
Stafford also said she did not think a large override would pass this year and could cost upwards of 20 positions if it should fail.
“The real problem is coming from the state,” Scriven said. “We’re not doing anything to move forward here.”
He asked if there was any push back from the towns on whether the shortfall is due to anything other than a failure of the state to adequately fund schools and asked what the towns’ legislative team was doing to push the state to adequately fund schools, especially regional districts.
“If we look at the 5 percent assessment that the town’s kind of lock us into, we’re never going to get out of this with a .0001-percent increase from the state every year,” Szymaniak said. “We’re just not. It’s not going to happen.”
Whitman Select Board member Shawn Kain argued that, to say the state does not adequately fund schools is something of a misconception, however.
“Through their eyes, they’re giving us too much state aid, and they’ve given us too much state aid for the last period of time,” he said. “Once we come out of the hold-harmless situation, then we get back into the typical scenario and they start to fund us with state aid that’s proportional to our budget.”
Both Scriven and Fred Small acknowledged that the current budget practices are putting an undo burden on taxpayers, especially those on fixed incomes. Small again advocated for a five-year plan to better demonstrate the need to taxpayers.
Hillary Kniffen reminded the board they have already done that and agreed the problem is the state funding and a misunderstanding among local taxpayers that the schools are overspending.
Member Dawn Byers asserted there is more of a revenue collection problem on the part of the towns than a budgeting problem with the schools.
“To recognize the concerns about the taxpayers, we’re only doing them a further disservice by using E&D of $250,000,” she said. “Because when you go to borrow for a middle school building, that interest rate’s going to go up because the district has used E&D.”
She also said, while it’s comforting that education won’t be impacted, she is still concerned about what positions will be cut.
Stafford also said residents do not realize that $600,000 of the money taken out of E&D last year went toward helping the district recover from a damaging data breach the year before, on which recovery work is still being done. That was done so the amount not covered by insurance was not billed to the towns.
“We’re not unique,” said Committee member Glen DiGravio, attending remotely. “This is happening all over the state. Every town’s going to be voting on an override, pretty much… I think this is a fair compromise proposal. I think the motion before us is something that gets us through.”
He said he knows the Committee wants to fix next year and the next five years, but they have to fix this year first.
“If an override is going to happen, no matter what, I think making it as painless as possible is what we should be doing now,” he said, advocating Szymaniak’s proposal.
Hanson’s questions
In Hanson, Weeks asked a question many residents have been wondering about: What happens if the override fails?
Hanson Town Counsel Kate Feodoroff said if either town rejected the budget while the other approves it, that is considered a rejection and the School Committee may decide not to accept that, which would force another town meeting. If Hanson, for example, were to approve only the lesser amount and Whitman approves the greater amount, School Committee may opt to accept the lesser amount and adjust Whitman’s portion accordingly, Feodoroff said.
The Committee is, however, also able to force a Super Town Meeting, attended by residents, and would have to work within a 1/12 budget until it is settled.
FitzGerald-Kemmett summed up for her board that it seemed that, at the first budget certification vote in March, she felt the School Committee felt that, since the two towns were discussing an override, “We’re going for the gusto, we’re going to go for the maximum,” she said. “I’m not saying that for dramatic effect. I think their feeling was, ‘If they’re going to do an override anyway, and that’s how we’re going to fund this delta between the 5 percent and whatever we vote, then, let’s not cut back on anything and keep as much E&D and Circuit-Breaker money as we can.’ I am not defending this, nor am I trying to condemn them. I’m just stating this is the perspective.”
She also stressed that the School Committee is elected to do the job of advocating for students.
“We’re elected to do a different job,” she said. “That’s why, at budget time, it may feel like we’re at different ends of the spectrum, but they’re doing what they feel they need to do. … We’re trying to balance the town’s budget, and I don’t want to say never the twain shall meet, because I’m eternally hopeful that the twain shall meet at some point.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett also said the forensic audit is also continuing, with a meeting planned for this month perhaps as early as this week.