The school administration continues its work on the Fiscal Year 2026 budget.
Last month, Town Manager Tony Marino presented a $66.4 million FY26 budget to the town council, with $40.1 million of that for the schools.
At Monday night’s school committee meeting, Superintendent of Schools Lisa Howard updated the committee on the ongoing budget process.
“This past week I met with the FinCom for a session with them to review the budget,” said Howard. “Obviously, changes are being made daily to the initial budget of … about a few months ago. Since then there have been some changes, I have brought them up to speed on those changes.”
Once those changes to the budget are final, Howard said she will bring them back to the school committee to talk about any line item changes prior to it being finalized by the town council., likely at its next meeting on Monday, May 19.
“We had some great questions, they are asking questions about class size,” said Howard. “They had questions about full-time equivalent people that were tied to grants, so I gave them that information. I also gave them information about class size now, which is pretty much going to be the class size next year with the exception of new students enrolling.”
Howard said the FinCom also asked how the schools are going to be using the $3.5 million that was approved by an override vote in April. In addition, voters also approved $1.4 million to fund an education stabilization account.
“The $3.5 million was going to be used to stabilize the budget and to have a level-service budget (and) not eliminate 30-plus teaching positions and raise user fees and the like, so I gave them a broad brush of that,” said Howard. “They understand that that $3.5 million is not coming into to add programs to the school and add classes and add staff. We are adding three staff members as part of the level-service budget, those are mandatory special ed positions.”
Howard said she anticipates meeting with the FinCom again on May 22.
“Last year, I did one meeting with them,” she said. “I agree that having a budget that is 60 percent of the overall town spending does require more than one session with the FinCom.”
Once the town council makes a final recommendation on what the budget should be, Howard said she would then go back in, if needed, and address anything that needs to be revised.
“Some of the things that could be revised, as I spoke to the FinCom and the school committee multiple times, and the public, I was conservative on the Title grants because of the talk in the state of Massashusetts and the country of those types of grants being eliminated,” said Howard. “As of right now, I have not heard that the Title 1 grant is going to be eliminated; there has been a lot of talk about the possibility of that. I believe the Title 4 grant was eliminated, but we haven’t gotten any confirmation of that.”
Howard said the school department was conservative with its approach to those grants, which provide about 85 percent of the money for grant-funded staff positions.