Silver Lake District towns were scrambling after Thursday, March 14th’s meeting with the combined Silver Lake school committees, when they learned that the budget, a “level-services” budget, was going to increase a whopping $6.7 million over last year, due largely to special education increases, including special ed transportation. The new district business manager, Sarah Hickey, presented a two-hour slide show depicting her take on the budget and her new formula for calculating the combined budget and its individual town shares.
As the initial shock subsided, representatives of all the member towns spoke up saying that even if they taxed up to their levy limit, they would not be able to meet the proposed increases, most of which are state mandated, without going back to their towns for overrides.
Jason Fraser, Plympton’s school committee representative on both the elementary and regional committees, as well as the Massachusetts Association of School Committees President-elect, was able to untangle the spaghetti lines and bring some sanity to the situation. Based on his advice, the Regional School Committee and the individual member towns voted to decrease assessments to member towns by $1,605,000 by cutting $855,000 from the budget itself and taking an additional $750,000 by drawing down the Excess and Deficiency (E&D) Fund to offset the assessments of member towns.
Fraser said that he wouldn’t ordinarily suggest using E&D revenues that are set aside to cover unexpected mid-year tuitions and services for special needs students, however this year he said, “as in FY25 we are assuming a large portion of the three towns’ Special Education cost which will make Silver Lake eligible for over $1.1 million in Circuit Breaker revenue starting in FY26. We are fortunate for the stewardship of the past and present Silver Lake School Committee members to have a fully funded and certified E&D fund.”
Significant cuts are now being considered at the local school committee level. “Kingston is looking at between $1 to $1.5 million in cuts. Halifax is considering $300,000 to $700,000 in cuts, and Plympton has proposals for $160,000 in cuts… Silver Lake did acknowledge they may need to cut further at a later meeting date but didn’t want to cut too deep before seeing what the local committees delivered”, Fraser continued. “It is common knowledge that it is far easier to amend a number down at Town Meeting than up. If the burden of cuts is shared as evenly as possible, it is likely Silver Lake will need to come back to the table for some hard conversations and possibly an even harder vote.”
Jon Wilhelmsen, who represented Plympton on the school committee for more than a decade suggests that the budget increase comes down to these items:
• A very significant increase in Special Education (SPED) costs – particularly out-of-district placements, though it would appear there are also increases to the in-district costs that contribute to very significant cost increases district-wide. “…there is literally only so much that the towns can pay to do this and as a result there will need to be cuts to the budgets in each of the three towns as well as at Silver Lake to bring this into fiscal balance.” Citing the upswing in out-of-district services as a major contributor to the cost increase, he hopes that many of these services can be brought back in-district over the next few years to mitigate the long-term impact.
• Sorting the Out-of-District setup –  The district has been set up like this for more than 20 years – and DESE (the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) knew or should have known about it.  DESE also does regular audits of the school programs and until last year, never had any issues with the set up – but none of the prior set-up has a material impact on the $6.7m level-service budget the towns are now facing.
• A largely new central office staff – who in fairness, is learning their role but appear to have a significant issue in communicating effectively. We have spent many weeks talking through the Silver Lake budget and it was only Thursday night that it became clear that SPED costs are largely driving the increases.
“Overall,” Wilhelmsen continued, “it is disappointing to see these numbers, but if that is what they are, then we must work around them for the students, the staff, and the three towns’ residents who have to finance this. It will mean cuts in all the schools as well as increases in budgets. Hopefully this is a high point and that we will see decreases in subsequent years so that we can appropriately restore cuts. I just wish we had gotten to this understanding weeks ago.”
Former school committee member Gordon C. Andrews told The Express, “The biggest issue is 14 students at $980,000, were not factored into this year’s budget …” then an additional 30 students were added for the upcoming budget. “We should not be finding out now the causes of the budget increases, in the middle of March, that the budget is this far out.” An enormous increase has been shown since the first assessment calculation presented in February. “No one understood why the increases were so large and everyone believed it was a mistake in the reallocation of programs from the changes of the regional agreement.”
“Its been talked about – the sustainability of the town of Halifax to afford the rate of growth of Silver Lake has been an issue with the budget was growing ($1 million) year to year, with an assessment of approximately 33%.” Andrews said, “the administration and the town of Halifax should have known the impacts of the enrollment changes and the budgetary cliff that the town was facing even before the increases in special needs education. “I am worried about the students and staff at the elementary school as they will have to take the brunt of the cuts that are required due to the town not understanding the impacts of the enrollment shift at Silver Lake, which was able to be forecast and was previously planned.”
Kingston’s school committee representative said last Thursday they would consider moving their town meeting date to give their town more time to deal with the budget.
To add to the perfect storm of budgetary catastrophe is the lack of the state’s SPED reimbursement formula to accurately take into account the actual rate of inflation, according to the Boston Globe, Tuesday, March 12. According to the Globe, towns statewide are grappling with shortfalls due to the state’s new formula.