Dr. David Hopson
I’ve been surprised by some of the information posted on the Department of Revenue’s website related to town budgets, town reserves, and their potential relationships to the Gateway School District’s budget. While I’ve always known that Gateway has done much to minimize the burden on our town’s taxes, it’s interesting to see—as a district average—how little impact the district has actually had on area property taxes compared to the perceptions that dominate local discussions. For more detail, you can review the presentation made to the school committee on April 10 that is posted under school committee presentations on the district’s website (www.grsd.org > School Committee> Presentations).
Taken together, the average percentage of the towns’ budgets used to fund the Gateway District has actually decreased in recent years, a result of a constant decrease in school budgets and a decrease in overall town assessments. That has come at a cost however—we’ve lost course offerings in the upper grades, resulting in fewer students being able to participate in the performing arts; have held back on replacing certain educational materials; and further reduced staffing levels. The argument that’s made locally (and throughout the state) is that as student enrollment decreases, the budget should decrease in lockstep. Using common sense, we can see that the two are not directly linked; i.e., unless we lose enough additional students to close more schools, the costs of maintaining the buildings doesn’t decrease just because there are a few less students in them. One of our larger expenses in a widespread district with low population density is transporting students. We’ve consolidated bus runs as student enrollment has decreased, but there is a point where you cannot continue to do this because students’ time on the bus becomes too great. Coupled with the increasing numbers of students needing additional support to succeed, and the more complex levels of support being required, it’s easy to see that you can’t directly correlate decreases in student enrollment with a decrease in the budget. In fact, looking at the past five years, the data points to the conclusion that we’ve cut more staff than justified by decreases in enrollments.
While regional school districts are limited in their E&D (Excess and Deficiency) accounts to 5 percent of their operating budgets, towns’ reserves (in this case free cash and stabilization) are not so severely limited. With the district using the bulk of its ‘reserves’ to reduce town assessments, our overall amount in E&D has shrunk in the past years. This is the opposite of our seven towns who, according to DOR figures, have seen a 25.44 percent increase in reserves from FY’04 to FY’11 to an average of $730,540 per town across the district in FY’11. In fact, in FY’11, the average reserve in our seven towns equaled 29.52% of their total expenditures, with Russell topping the list at 56.49 percent of their total budget. As part of the seven towns’ attempts to ‘buy down’ the tax rate by using reserves, our seven towns taxed underneath the tax levy in FY’12 by a total of $539,516 – yet as we’ve seen, still managed to grow said reserves over time.
Time, space, and the needs of the negotiating process prohibit a long and detailed description of how the district and its labor unions have settled contracts. I will point out that the Gateway District is generally not paying our employees at a comparable rate with other districts in the state or even in Western Massachusetts. Despite this, I believe we have a wonderful staff, each of whom goes above and beyond the minimum requirements to ensure students are receiving an excellent education in a safe, secure, and welcoming environment. Given the ongoing pressures on educators at all levels, the increased difficulty for our students of getting into colleges or finding productive work, the changes occurring in society, and the increased learning difficulties that many of our students face, I believe the district has done a great job preparing the towns’ children for their future. It’s time now to face the reality that this cannot continue if we must cut even further into those programs that help students just so that specific towns—who face larger increases in school assessments due to the state’s required educational expenditures along with a growing percentage of students in the district—have a lower educational assessment. The district has been, and will continue to be, financially prudent, but asking for continued significant budget reductions and failing to even fund the same level of student services year to year will have immediate and long-lasting implications for the education of our children.
