FITCHBURG – Lamenting their districts’ inability to keep up with mounting financial obligations, representatives from nearly a dozen school districts in the region at a public forum Tuesday night called on the state to finally overhaul its public education funding formula for the first time in 25 years.
About 100 people were in the audience for the event, which was one of three such public forums the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents organized across the state Tuesday night in an effort to bring attention to school systems’ campaign for more education aid. School officials at the Fitchburg forum said a couple more events will be held during this budget season as well.
Hosted at Fitchburg State University, Tuesday’s Central Massachusetts forum drew school administrators and school committee members from the Worcester, Fitchburg, Leominster, Gardner, Clinton, Framingham, Lunenberg, Winchendon, Ayer-Shirley, and Ashburnham-Westminster school systems.
Part of the novelty of the event, some officials pointed out, is that it’s not often such a disparate collection of towns and cities come together united on a single issue.
“It takes a while for everybody to get on the same page,” said Leominster Mayor Dean Mazzarella. But in the case of public school funding, he added, “if your community isn’t impacted yet, it will be.”
In the case of the assembled communities at the Fitchburg forum, the inadequacy of the state’s current foundation formula – the system that determines what each district should be spending to operate – has already led to hard choices, officials said. Gardner Superintendent Mark Pellegrino, for instance, said it was only the mayor’s dive into the city’s stabilization funds this year that allowed the district to avoid a major deficit – a move that only “put off the inevitable,” he added, once that $600,000 shortfall re-emerges in the district’s next fiscal budget.
“We’re moving money around to do the best we can with the little that we have,” he said.
But many school systems “are now at a breaking point,” said Leominster Superintendent Paula Deacon, who described her district’s current predicament as “reverse Robin Hood syndrome ... who are we going to take from this year” in one part of the budget to fund one of the other parts?
Tuesday’s forum focused specifically on the foundation formula’s under-calculation of the cost districts currently incur to provide health insurance and offer special education services – two of the four key areas in the foundation formula a special state commission recommended updating in 2015. According to a presentation put together by Brian Allen, the Worcester schools’ chief financial and operations officer, the districts represented in Fitchburg – subtracting Ashburnham-Westminster and replacing it with Webster – combined spent $174 million above what the foundation formula says they should have spent in fiscal 2017 on those two categories.
That gap existed even after many of those districts changed their employees’ health benefits, putting more of the cost burden on the plan-holders, as well as created new special education programming to cut down on the number of students having to be placed in expensive out-of-district programs.
“There’s really nowhere to go from here,” Worcester Superintendent Maureen Binienda said.
By fully implementing the 2015 recommendations of the Foundation Budget Review Commission, however, Mr. Allen said the 10 districts together would receive $117 million in additional annual state aid.
The problem in recent years, however, has been organizing the political will to commit to that much additional spending, which statewide would amount to more than $1 billion in new aid for public schools. But while the Legislature’s latest effort to come up with a comprehensive bill fell short at the session deadline this past summer, lawmakers at Tuesday’s forum said they are hopeful they can finally reach an agreement this year.
“I’m optimistic this time around we’ll have enough time to pass something ... and I’m hoping that something is 100 percent funded,” said state Sen. Dean Tran, R-Fitchburg, who mentioned lawmakers plan to unveil their newest legislation on the foundation formula, called the Promise Act, Wednesday.
In the meantime, school officials called on the audience, which included other elected officials, teachers and parents, to continue to put pressure on their local lawmakers to support the effort to revamp the school aid formula.
