The 2026-27 school budget and the status of several district grants were the focal point of Monday night’s school committee meeting.
Superintendent of Schools Lisa Howard outlined the budget process for the coming weeks as the school committee subcommittees get ready to meet on a proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget. She also discussed how the MBTA 3A Communities Act has and could continue to affect several grants, including the 21st Century Grant, which provides funding for afterschool student programming in Winthrop.
“The preliminary projected budget is drafted and almost ready for the budget subcommittee to meet and discuss,” said Howard. “In this draft you will receive, all the salaries have been updated in terms of steps and lanes as we know of it right now. All the expenses have been reviewed and updated.”
Howard said the district looked at the FY26 expenditures and where the district is looking at cost increases for certain contracts has been updated.
“All of the new mandatory special education items such as staffing, tuition, transportation cost projections, service contracts, and general expenditures have also been updated,” said Howard.
One big factor in the budget revolves around the currently unresolved budget negotiations with four bargaining units.
“Given the state of contract negotiations not being settled right now for teachers, ESPs, nurses, and secretaries; similar to what we did in past years, we’ve created a contingency line with dollars in that contingency line,” said Howard. “We will be updating that over the next couple of days based on our last offer to make sure that we are in line with what those increases may be. We cannot put them in the salary line yet because we have not established what those salary tables will look like, but we do have a projected figure, and I will share that with the subcommittee.”
As of Monday, Howard said she was looking to have the budget subcommittee meet on Thursday, March 26 with a second meeting scheduled for Wednesday, April 1.
Moving forward, Howard said there will need to be a public hearing on the budget at a school committee meeting that will likely take place in early April.
The next step after the public hearing would be for the school committee to vote on a budget, and then the budget would be brought to the town’s finance commission on May 14.
“Typically, it is me that does the presentation to the finance commission,” said Howard. “They ask questions about the budget; their job is to make a recommendation to the town council. They will likely have me come in twice this year; our budget is the largest budget in the town and it takes an awful lot of time to go through it.”
After the finance commission to the town council on the total allocation of funds for the FY27 budget, the town council will vote on the budget. The budget then goes back to the school committee for a final vote and that becomes the budget for FY27, Howard said.
Howard also gave the school committee on where the district stands on a number of grants, including the 21st Century Grant which helps fund afterschool programs in the district. She said Winthrop is rated as an exemplary district in the program, yet it was not awarded a supplemental grant award to help fund programs during the summer, as well as supplemental funds to help students with special needs. Howard said those supplemental amounts totaled about $26,000.
The superintendent also noted that she has gone through a frustrating process trying to find out from the state department of education ties the grant to compliance with the MBTA 3A Communities Act, with the application process for the next three-year round of grant funding for the program ongoing.
“I reached out to the associate commissioner of student and family support at the Department of Education on Friday and she was sorry and sad to to tell me the reason that grant had not been reviewed is because one of the criteria to apply for the grant is you have to be a community that is recognized as being compliant with 3A,” said Howard. “As you can imagine, I had many questions about why 3A would have anything to do with students who can’t vote and don’t have input into that process. Why would the Department of Education, who is asking us to move students forward and support mental health and keep kids safe after school, why would they be putting handcuffs on us for a decision that students can’t make and that’s not really tied to public education in that context.”
Howard said grants are never guaranteed, and that if the district is eligible for the 21st Century Grant in FY27, it will apply for the grant, and if it is not, it will not apply.
“It’s a tremendous amount of work to write that grant,” said Howard.
Overall, between discretionary competitive grants and entitlement grants, Howard said the district typically gets about $1 million per year from those funding sources.
“You wonder why somebody focuses so much on grants, the Winthrop public schools relies heavily on over $1 million in grants,” said Howard. “So when you take one grant away, the majority of our grants supplement staff in the schools, so when you take the salary out, the salary goes away and typically the person will go away.”
Town Council President Jim Letterie said both state Representative Jeff Turco and state Senator Lydia Edwards have been made aware of the issue with the 21st Century Grant.