Something going on??

from the Town Administrator weekly report of August 29, 2019::

Town Clerk: – I spent a lot of time this week responding to a summons for documents from the State Ethics office. I attended the department head meeting. Continue to be busy with marriage certificates and vital records request. Posted the Attorney General’s decision on the general bylaw changes from the Annual Town Meeting.

In case you need some reading material, here is the Bump report, a study and conclusion by Massachusetts state auditor Suzanne Bump.

https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2017/10/18/RegionalSchoolDistrictsMunicipalImpactStudy_1.pdf


A few of the things found in the report:

To address some of the challenges highlighted by the study, Bump has called on the Commonwealth to modernize its funding structure for regional schools by:

• Developing deeper incentives to encourage communities to regionalize, noting that the current incentives do not provide enough enticement for schools to give up some measure of local control;
• Fully funding its commitment to reimburse 100 percent of regional transportation expenses, offer stipends to encourage efficiencies to reduce transportation costs, and allow the use of regional transportation authorities to provide RSD transportation;
• Offering planning grants to explore the combination of existing RSDs into larger groupings; and
• Ensuring greater transparency from the Massachusetts School Building Authority on its decision-making process for districts that close school facilities.

Additionally, in the study, Bump calls on the Legislature to streamline the budget adoption process for RSDs and to examine and revise inconsistent funding formulas for children whose families choose educational options outside of their home community. Bump also called for RSDs to conduct periodic reviews of their regional agreements.

The Templeton Common Master Plan link.

https://www.templetonma.gov/sites/templetonma/files/file/file/final_report_1_22_10.pdf 


enjoy the read and trip down memory lane.

A letter to the editor; could this be Templeton in the future?

something to think about if you think bringing in all this business will solve everything.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Athol is booming — shopping centers galore — Orange is the made for TV movie capital of the state. Lots of hard cash is flowing into our towns. Marijuana growers and sellers have taken over Main Street with mega proposals for business ventures and job offers.

Our local economy is in the clouds or one would think it should be. Yet upon a closer look we see a very different picture. We see drugs claiming too many of our local young lives. Neighbors who have worked hard all their lives having to sell their beloved homes because of this town’s insatiable appetite for higher and higher taxes that most folks, especially our elderly on fixed incomes, can’t afford to pay. It’s disgraceful to say the least. It makes me wonder, with so much development in the area shouldn’t the residential taxes go down as “Big Business” pays its share of town expenses?

Jim McGovern and Anne Gobi are you asleep at the wheel? Our own Suzie Whipps needs to take a real close look at why all this “progress” and “boom” isn’t trickling down to the “little guy” in the form of property tax relief.

The lifelong residents, especially the elderly, need lower taxes, more services and answers and transparency about how these huge projects and corporations, hotels, et all are going to benefit us townspeople.

We still have no clue as to why we lost our over-qualified FBI-man police chief. A really fine man by all accounts.

Why are our schools so interested in political correctness? They are forgetting school is for reading, writing and arithmetic.

Parents aren’t allowed to question our superintendent? Give me a break. What’s going on here?

We built a multi-million dollar new school building, but it’s like putting lipstick on a pig if the curriculum is still garbage and can’t seem to compete with what’s taught at Bement School or Deerfield Academy, the top private schools. It’s all an effort in futility.

Wake up citizens of Athol and Orange and find out exactly when we can expect some tangible benefit from all this commerce.

We need a local task force made up of locals to protect homeowners so our area won’t remain the foreclosure capital of the state!

I’m sure I’m not the only one saddened by what I see all over our towns.

We need to do something now!

Molly Bennett Aitken

Athol

All regional school districts can now be listed in the same category as municipal / state governments - financially questionable. Why would I post that you ask / ponder.

And if you share or copy, please include the details;
June 4, 2019, Narragansett FY2020 "budget" spread sheet shows Templeton minimum contribution at $4,618,384.00, while the department of education (DESE) shows it to be $4,621,299.00 for FY2020. The DESE information comes from the web page of MA department of education (DESE) and this same web page shows chapter 70 state aid at $9,951,444.00 while the above referenced spread sheet from NRSD shows FY2020 chapter 70 money at $9,938,544.00. Please keep in mind, the dollar figures from NRSD were put together BEFORE the final state budget was signed with no veto's, by the governor.

Also note, state aid is based off of information provided by the district on October 1 of the previous year. In this case, October 1, 2018, which in calendar time is less than one year ago. In financial terms, it appears to be two years behind, hence you might have heard (more than once) school superintendent state, the information is two years behind. Fiscally speaking, I suppose one could make that argument, however, I am a simple lil' ole guy, so to me, it is less than a year old. That is just how my rusty old rolladex works.

In short, if anyone expects something other than a no vote at the district meeting, I need to see a detailed and up to date, breakdown of town spending on schools.

As school districts around Massachusetts struggle to balance their budgets, lawmakers are considering changing the state’s formula for funding schools. Gov. Charlie Baker, the Senate and the House have taken different approaches to fixing it. Their bills will get a hearing March 22.

Here are some of the questions lawmakers will grapple with as they weigh the different bills:

How does the state make the formula more equitable? How does it bring it in line with the current costs of education? How does the state pay for the skyrocketing costs of health insurance for teachers? And the rising costs of educating students in special education? How much more money does it cost to provide an adequate education for poor children and students who aren’t fluent in English? How much should the state subsidize schools in wealthy and medium-income communities? How much more money should the state be paying for education?

To understand what will happen next, it’s important to understand what’s happening now.

Here’s our primer on how the state pays for education.

Like many other states, Massachusetts dictates how much each community should spend on schools.

“Education is the only area where the state tells cities and towns how much to spend on a local function,” Jeff Wulfson, deputy commissioner for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said. “We don’t tell cities and towns how much to spend on a local fire department or on their public works department.”

That is in part because of the state’s constitution, ratified in 1780.

"[I]t shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish … the public schools and grammar schools in the towns," the framers wrote.

Two centuries later, parents of schoolchildren in Brockton said the state wasn’t living up to its constitutional obligation. Specifically, they argued the state’s school financing system violated the constitution.

In June 1993, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided in McDuffy vs. the Secretary of the Executive Office of Education that the state had a duty to provide an education for all students, no matter where they lived. The court left it to lawmakers and the governor to come up with a new funding system.

Later that same month, the governor signed into law the Education Reform Act, which would increase state aid for schools and included a new formula for funding them.

To devise the formula, superintendents and policymakers added up the cost of all the things they thought went into educating kids. That included class size goals of 22 students for elementary school and 25 students for middle school, as well as the cost of teachers’ salaries and benefits, administration, maintenance, teacher professional development, and books. They called it the “Foundation Budget.”

“The importance of the foundation at the time was that it acknowledged there was a minimum amount of money per pupil amount that every community needed to provide for a basic education,” Tom Scott, the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, said. “That’s why it’s called the foundation budget. It’s the foundation. It’s the minimal amount.”

The average minimum amount now for a student is $11,448 per year. That formula adds additional aid for districts with high percentages of students who are poor or in special education.

Who pays for that? Part of it comes from taxpayers across the state.

“There is no school district in the Commonwealth whose city or town is paying for the full cost of those schools,” Wulfson said. “The state subsidizes the educational costs of every school district in the state. What varies is the amount that we subsidize it.”

To determine how much a community can afford to pay for schools, the state looks at the income of people living there and property values. For communities with a lot of wealth, the state pays up to 17.5 percent of its basic costs per student. In some poorer cities, the state is paying around 90 percent of those costs.

Even though the state sets a minimum cost for educating kids and helps all districts pay for that, it doesn’t set a maximum. For many districts, $11,448 per student isn’t enough. Some spend more than twice that.

“Certainly many districts voluntarily choose to spend more than that from their local resources,” Wulfson said. “That is one of the proof-points that probably the foundation budget does need to be adjusted when so many people feel it’s inadequate.”

Okay, when we get to the joint district meeting and the amount comes up, which currently stands at $19,786,889.00, we need to see the breakdown of the expenses; the amount from state aid, the two towns assessments. Why is that important you ask?

Phillipston annual town meeting of May 8, 2019.

Town voted $1,657,099.00 (article 11)

http://www.phillipston-ma.gov/sites/phillipstonma/files/minutes/minutes-file/atm_2019_voted_actions.pdf

Templeton voted at special town meeting of July 18, 2019

Town voted $6,491,070.00 (article 1)

https://www.templetonma.gov/sites/templetonma/files/uploads/stm2019july.pdf

So, we have $6,491,070.00 + $1,657,099.00 = $8,148,169.00.

Then take numbers (estimates) from DESE or DLS web page:

All budgets are estimates; schools, Towns, states, feds.

Total state aid = $10,861,995.00.

So, $10,861,995.00 + E&D $500,000.00 + Medicaid $300,000.00 = $11,661,995.00.

$11,661,995.00 + $8,148,169.00 = $19,810,164.00, so, using Templeton voted number and Phillipston number along with state estimates, the school district will already be getting more money than they asked for. What is the problem? My calculator off? Their calculator off? The above numbers still leave the school with $135,000.00 in E&D funds too.

Please go check it out and see for yourself - before any district wide meeting, or at the very least, at the meeting, we all need to see these numbers and if we do not or are told we cannot see them or any other line of bull, I will vote no.