Valery Young, Westford Resident

This letter is not to persuade you in favor or against the override votes. Officials and staff have worked for months to give residents a choice – right-size the revenue to meet increased expenses and provide the same level of services – or spend only the 2.5%-constrained revenue and make staff and service reductions. Each resident needs to evaluate their own priorities and situation to decide how to vote. As you weigh your choice, I’d like to clarify some misinformation being circulated about the school budget.

“There’s reckless spending.”

Even with a successful override, the school budget represents belt-tightening, efficiencies, reductions and increased usage of revolving account balances, including a reduction of 8 classroom teachers due to declining enrollment and 4 administrators, a $120k reduction in software subscriptions, $332k more in offsets from revolving accounts.

“You have too much money in reserves.” 

Schools have many ‘revolving accounts’ for taking money in for particular reasons (think: school lunch) and there are rules on eligible uses. The balances are being drawn down strategically, and using one-time funds as lump sums pushes the recurring deficit to next year.

“Schools have claimed a crisis before and it ended fine.” 

The budget cycle does sometimes have adjustments and changes made, however no “fix” in recent years is the same size as the FY25 deficit. In FY20 a proposed reduction of six Reading Interventionists was restored after the town’s new growth projection was adjusted by $132k. In FY21 a proposal to reduce a Latin teacher and phase out the language resulted in the reduction being swapped for a Spanish teacher. In FY22, the proposed budget was $441k over allocation plus accounted for $444k savings from a four-tier bus schedule change; ultimately $596k of one-time funds were used which led to hard reductions in the FY23 budget.

“You over-promised in the teacher contract.” 

Town and school leadership have committed to providing all employees an average level of pay after a robust benchmarking analysis. Teachers had three settled consecutive 1-year contracts, plus the 2017 override used projections of 1.5% yearly adjustments while other districts increased to 2.5% COLAs, so when the next 3-year contract was being negotiated, the data showed that teachers were below average. Below average pay can lead to low morale and retention issues.

“I don’t trust what happened in the 2017 override.”

A common misconception is that the “2017 schools override” didn’t go to the schools. It was actually a targeted override to address below-average teacher pay, not for the general operating budget. Teacher raises are contractual obligations and the money was fully paid. However, it is also true that at the same time, the school budget had to face some reductions. I understand the mistrust this may have caused, and this time, there will be ongoing financial reviews with Select Board and FinCom to track the override projections, efficiencies and reductions.

“Enrollment is down, shouldn’t your budget be lower?”

Student enrollment has decreased, but classroom teachers have also been responsibly reduced — in fact THIRTY-SEVEN (16 Elem + 13 Mid + 8 WA) have been reduced since FY17. However it is also true that some staff have been added — most in areas of counseling, nursing, special education and English Learner positions — because  our student needs have changed and the % of High Needs students has doubled since 2012 (15 to 27%).

“Enrollment is down, can’t you close a school?” 

There was an internal 2014 utilization study which used a target usage per school when enrollment was higher, therefore some are assuming a school can be closed. So much has changed since 2014 — preschool classes are now in the K-2 buildings; kindergarten classes are all full-day; and importantly, we offer programming to meet our changing student needs that require spaces (increased interventions, special education services, medically fragile classrooms, deaf & hard of hearing classrooms, social-emotional inclusive classrooms) — not to mention the best practices of education have continued to evolve, so classrooms are not strict rows of desks, but have spaces for small-group instruction and flexible seating.

These are my personal remarks here, and I am neither speaking for any other members, nor presenting an official view of the committee.

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