Why Massachusetts schools are having an ‘extremely difficult’ financial year
September 04, 2024
As a new school year kicks off, teachers across Massachusetts will be heading back to the classroom with fewer colleagues as districts tighten budgets.
In the Boston suburb of Braintree, a $4 million budget shortfall for this school year led to layoffs of roughly 40 staff members, meaning 5% of the total workforce aren’t returning to the district this month.
“It’s disappointing,” said Truong Dinh, a physics teacher at Braintree High School and president of Braintree’s teacher’s union. “When [the tighter budget] was announced back in April it was very tough on morale.”
School districts across the state are struggling with finances due to high inflation, less state funding tied to enrollment decreases, and the expiration of pandemic-era federal funds.
Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, estimated about half of Massachusetts school districts are operating with painfully tight budgets.
“We’re seeing not only layoffs but we’re getting calls from constituents saying their kids’ AP classes are being impacted. Art and music are being cut because of the budget crisis,” he said.
When inflation reached a high of 8% in 2022, it drove up operating costs for all kinds of school expenses, like transportation, food and utilities. Increases in educator salaries following new contract deals are also a factor. For example, in 2023, the Braintree Education Association secured a 9% raise for educators that will be phased in over three years.
“It was an extremely difficult budget year,” Braintree Mayor Erin Joyce said.
Still, it could have been worse. In June, Braintree voters passed an $8 million tax override that steered an additional $4 million to the school district, which allowed school leaders to cut the number of planned staff layoffs by half.
The city has struggled to raise enough tax revenue to cover yearly school cost increases. The district’s operating costs typically go up by 4% to 5% each year, according to Joyce, but state law prescribes a 2.5% limit to how much a city can increase its tax levy.
“That’s going to be a real constraint for us, especially in the next couple of years,” Joyce said.
Additionally, a federal COVID-relief stimulus program known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, that sent $2.5 billion to Massachusetts schools is expiring at the end of September. So districts have less of a financial cushion to absorb rising costs.
The Braintree school system relied heavily on federal ESSER funding to plug growing budget gaps during the pandemic and subsequent years. The district received about $4.5 million of additional funding through the life of the program.
“It wasn’t even like we were cutting programs that we added because of these funds, we were looking at just how are we going to operate now that that money is no longer there?” Joyce said.
Meanwhile, Worcester is making tough choices as the result of expiring ESSER funds. When the federal money was distributed, the school committee decided to invest those funds on additional counselors for students and on extra teachers, among other things. The district hoped to continue supporting those roles with funds from the 2019 Student Opportunity Act, a state law designed to provide more funding to districts that serve high-needs students or that are located in low-income areas.
But high inflation foiled those plans, according to Worcester Superintendent Rachel Monárrez. The Student Opportunity Act’s school funding formula has an inflation adjustment cap of 4.5%, which hasn’t kept up with post-pandemic inflation rate increases, especially in 2022 when inflation reached about 8%, according to the Massachusetts Budget & Policy Center.
Worcester Public Schools cut close to 200 positions or about 3% of its workforce prior to this year.
“We were using ESSER funds to maintain positions that were a luxury,” Monárrez said. “We’ve had to pull those back.”
She adds the staffing cuts hit the district’s newest teachers the hardest.
Meanwhile, other districts are dealing with lower revenue due to enrollment losses.
The western Mass. district of Pittsfield lost about 1,000 students over the last decade due to factors like a shrinking school-age population and inter-district school choice. And because of stagnant economic growth, the city isn’t able to chip in much additional funding to cover school budget shortfalls.
“The money isn’t there, and the growth in the property values isn’t there or investment in real estate,” said school committee chair William Cameron.
A recent flow of migrant families into the city temporarily increased per-student state funding. Last school year, Pittsfield schools enrolled about 400 additional newcomer students who have been staying in nearby shelters.
Still, Cameron says, the increase in per-student funding from these additional students has not kept pace with the rising cost of wages for Pittsfield educators. The most recent teacher contract stipulates that educators get a 5% raise every year.
“Unless something amazing happens, we’re going to face a serious financial problem that will have an adverse effect on the schools,” Cameron said.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association and Massachusetts Association of School Committees are pushing for lawmakers to adjust state education spending for inflation spikes.
In other cities, school districts are getting a boost from city budgets. In Framingham, the school system lost about 140 students in the last two school years, which district leaders attribute to demographic changes in the city caused by population shifts from high housing costs.
Framingham schools cut 12 positions out of about 1,300 this year. The city increased its local contribution to the school budget by nearly $8 million which helped the district avoid larger staff and programming cuts.
Boston Public Schools, which has lost roughly 9,000 students in 10 years, also got a significant helping hand from the municipal budget. In June, Mayor Michelle Wu and the city council approved a roughly $80 million increase to the city’s school budget to help the school system adjust to the end of ESSER funds and absorb higher inflation costs.
“We’ve been fortunate that the city has really stayed committed,” said David Bloom, BPS’s chief financial officer. “Even as enrollments decline we’ve been able to keep up.”
Still, members of the Boston School Committee have expressed concern over Boston’s long-term ability to support the school district with additional municipal funds.
The new state budget that passed in July brought an additional $235 million for K-12 schools.
But for Dinh, the teacher and Braintree union leader, the news is bittersweet because the district’s layoffs were approved before the new funding was announced. He hopes lawmakers and voters are paying attention to this year’s school budget struggles so they’ll continue to support funding increases down the line.
“Because we can’t continue doing more with less,” he said.