It has about 29,000 residents. It has four elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school. It has about 3,300 students in public schools. The municipality has a total budget of about $139 million. Of that, $80 million is spent on public education. Now, this is not Northampton. It is Windsor, Connecticut, the town I moved from to Northampton.
There are significant differences between the communities, but many similarities. The total Northampton municipal budget is $132 million. Northampton’s public-school population is about 2,500 students. Northampton spends only $36.5 million on public education. Northampton has 75% of the student population of Windsor but spends only 45% of what Windsor spends.
A community that prioritizes public education does not promote a budget where the public schools are the only budget area forced to reduce services. A community that cares about public education does not prioritize putting more money into already robust savings accounts while it eliminates 30 jobs of already understaffed and underpaid public employees.
That is like deciding to pay only 90% of our mortgage bill because we want to put more cash in the bank.
Northampton politicians made choices years ago to fund investments in education by using one-time funds, repeatedly. Now, they do not want to do this anymore, even though they still can. These politicians have also decided the people who will pay for this change in budgeting strategy will be the newly unemployed teachers and support staff, and our public school students, who are 31% low income and 40% high needs. Class sizes will approach 30 at our high school.
In Windsor, class sizes are in the low 20s at all levels. I pay more than two times the taxes here in Northampton, while getting less than half the school spending of Windsor. Northampton schools are underfunded and understaffed, and if the mayor sticks to her plan, they will only be more so.
How can these be the values of “progressive Northampton,” where “equity” gets mentioned so often? Not only is public education not a priority in Northampton, but because it is the only budget item to face reductions, it is fair to say public education is the lowest priority. That is very sad. Is this what you want?
In her July 25 guest column [“The brutal reality of public school funding”], Ellen Nigrosh misrepresents my views on what Northampton can do financially to support public education and other essential services, so I’ll set the record straight.
My opinions are informed by my experience as an 18-year veteran of the Windsor, Connecticut Town Council, deputy mayor for many years, and spending 12 years as the finance committee chair. I was deeply immersed in the creation of annual budgets and other financial matters. Windsor has the same sized population as Northampton and an annual budget of similar size. This makes my expertise relevant to Northampton.
I am very aware of the constraints on municipal governments. While the particulars vary by state, the overall situation is of unrelenting financial pressure on local governments. When Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra proposed her fiscal year 2025 budget in May 2024 reducing public school services and eliminating 24 staff positions, I initially assumed that Northampton was in bad shape financially. Why else would you cut your public school workforce and reduce educational services for our children?
But what I later found shocked me. More than 10 consecutive years of budget surpluses between $4-6 million, and an added mountain of cash in the bank. The last accounting had Northampton’s reserves at about $35 million. While Northampton is below the state average in teacher salaries and per pupil education spending, there is one area where we are well above average — our cash reserves. We currently rank 8th in the state for total cash on hand among 351 cities and towns in the state. For cities with over $100 million budgets, Northampton ranks 2nd in the state for cash reserves as a percentage of the budget. No poor city here. So the question again is, if you are bringing in millions more than you spend every year, why are you cutting school services?
Ms. Nigrosh accepts Mayor Sciarra’s view that there is not sufficient money coming in on a yearly basis to maintain level services. The mayor’s budget has reduced public school services for two years in a row. After analyzing Northampton’s financial history using publicly available official documents, I believe the mayor could have applied an additional $2 million to the FY25 school budget. We would have still ended the year with a budget surplus. We have the means to help our schools and children more than we are at present. Ms. Nigrosh implies that the city can only rely on 2.5% property tax increases per year and that is why our schools can’t be fully funded. This isn’t true. Northampton’s property tax only generates about 60% of the total city revenue. The other 40% comes from non-property tax sources including interest income and consumer spending taxes. In the past two fiscal years the total general fund revenue growth has been 5% each year. In short, Northampton’s total revenue pie is much bigger than Ms. Nigrosh believes.
The mayor and her allies tell us there is no other choice but to permanently reduce public school services because there isn’t enough money. Since only our schools have faced reductions, no other city services have been cut, it is fair to conclude that everything else seems to be a higher priority than our schools. If we prioritize our public school children as we should, will we be able to generate all the funding they need at once? Not at once; but we can make a good start followed by incremental efforts to improve funding across multiple years to meet our children’s needs. Will this require a modification of future spending plans? Likely yes. Essential services should always come first.
Why don’t we have public discussions of the city’s priorities? The mayor has been asked to hold public forums or town hall meetings on this topic many times and has refused. The president of our neighborhood association wrote to the mayor in February asking for a community-wide discussion of the school funding question. The mayor never replied to his request. City residents affiliated with Support Our Schools have asked for a public dialogue forum as well. No answer. Our mayor avoids face to face public dialogue with people in her own city.
The idea that there are no alternatives to the mayor’s current path of reduced public education services is just factually wrong. Suggestions of alternative solutions are caricatured in the extreme and presented against the mayor’s position as “it’s my way or disaster.” I moved here from a same-sized city where things were done differently, and a tiny bit of research shows me that other Massachusetts cities are managing their finances differently as well. Northampton can learn from other practices if it wants to solve this problem. It requires acknowledging that the old fiscal stability plan isn’t working any more.
Consider this: We were told to vote for the last override to avoid service cuts. Yet, only a few years later, school services were cut. The truth is, the mayor’s current plan requires both permanent cuts to school services plus more tax overrides. Who wants to pay more taxes and yet have essential services cut?
What we need are new ideas, creative solutions, and more communicative and flexible leaders who engage the public directly to find solutions that meet the needs of our community, and especially our children. Northampton’s children should not be the first to pay the price of leaders’ rigid loyalty to a plan that doesn’t work anymore.
Over the last year, a grassroots coalition of educators, caregivers, grandparents, students and residents have been demanding level-services funding for Northampton Public Schools (NPS) and condemning the mayor’s budget, which led to cuts. Throughout the spring, six city councilors and the mayor were warned about the high costs of losing 22 educators to budget cuts.
Their warnings were ignored, and this year all that they were told would happen is unfolding. Educators have given hours of public comment documenting the ways cuts to staff are negatively affecting children and disproportionately harming our most vulnerable students — low-income students, students with disabilities, students of color, refugees and immigrants.
In one elementary school, where 50% of our students are low-income, teachers are being forced to ration reading and math interventions, including grant funds for poor students. Our mayor, enabled by a majority of the City Council, has put a first grade teacher in the position of having to decide which six of twelve qualifying students will receive additional support while the other half receive nothing.
Another first grade teacher has two students who qualify for math intervention not receiving any support and only two of eight students who qualify for receiving reading intervention services. At our most recent School Committee meeting, a beloved special education teacher at JFK announced their resignation because they could “no longer deal with physically or mentally the crisis at JFK middle school.”
This is unconscionable anywhere, but allowing such conditions to persist, especially in a relatively affluent town that prides itself as progressive, is indefensible.
Despite the dire warnings and subsequent accounts, the mayor has refused to pivot. Northampton continues to underestimate its revenues to generate large surpluses that can then be magically transformed into one-time funds and stuffed into various savings accounts.
For FY24, the state certified $11.7 million in free cash, largely made up by recurring revenues, but the mayor only brought forward one mid-year appropriation to support the schools — $40,000 to hire two paraeducators for Bridge Street School — an order that resulted from safety issues and a grievance process. That is 0.3% of this year’s free cash.
The mayor, chair of the School Committee, voted against the mid-year appropriation request of $600,000 and did not recommend funding it to the City Council.
The mayor will say they are simply following state Department of Revenue “best practices” to save 3-5% of recurring revenues a year for “one-time costs.” However, Northampton is averaging 5-7%, and the DOR does not suggest underfunding core public services by depriving them of recurring revenue in order to generate free cash.
There are many best practices for a whole host of issues — from providing adequate staffing to schools, to treating your workforce with dignity. It is a choice to focus entirely on one “best practice,” treat it as an immutable law of nature, and ignore all other competing values and needs. It is a choice not to adjust our financial policies and practices to meet the needs of children.
The mayor has chosen to turn a deaf ear and blind eye to the testimony of teachers, support staff, and community members and refuses to fix the harm caused by her budget. At this point it is impossible for the mayor or the six city councilors who support her budget to claim they did not know the schools are in crisis. They know, but do not think there is an actual problem that needs to be solved or even one that requires their attention.
Instead, they suggest the need to cut schools now so they don’t have to cut them later. In other words, they see the needs as too high and they will never try to meet them, so just cut them now and make degraded services the norm. In their view, the problem is that people won’t accept this politely — not that city officials need to rise to the moment and engage in a democratic process with residents to decide what priorities our budget should reflect.
When they do talk about addressing the problem, they usually blame the state. While the state funding formula does impact relatively affluent towns like Northampton and the state and federal government should be providing more resources, no help is on the horizon, but we have the means to help ourselves. Our Chapter 70 funding has been nearly flat for two decades and the city has had plenty of time to figure out how to fund education at the local level and often sold overrides as supporting the schools when only a portion of those revenues supported the NPS operating budget.
I wish I could say that the issue of NPS funding was unique. However, across a whole host of contentious city issues, the mayor refuses to engage with constituents or pivot, as a leader should, to build broad-based support for her positions and initiatives. City Councilor Marissa Elkins recently remarked, in response to criticism of the lack of transparency in the capital planning process, that the mayor does not have to listen to anyone and could consult a chia pet if she wanted.
To think this is one thing; to say it tells us a lot about the confidence of this administration and supporters to do whatever they want regardless of its impact or community opinion.
— Michael Stein is a Ward 4 School Committee Member and chairs the Budget and Property Subcommittee.
