The Kingston School Committee met on Tuesday, April 2. It was a packed house with even more attendees joining the meeting virtually.
The Committee opened the meeting to anyone from the public wishing to speak. Carl Pike, who serves on the Finance Committee and is a retired town treasurer, spoke on behalf of the town. Pike said that he has been a huge supporter of the schools and their budgets for years. “We have always, since I’ve been involved, tried to be very conservative in our financial management. We’ve tried to service the various functions of the various departments – the schools – while at the same time thinking about the residents, the annual tax bills, etc… Proposition 2 ½ says that we are able to tax our residents an increase of 2 ½ percent every year. We always hope to get some new growth… so that gives us another percent, so we try to keep the budget increases each year to about 3 ½ percent,” Pike said. He went on to say that the initial goal was to keep each department around a 3 ½ percent increase and noted that most came in under 5 percent. He continued saying that the schools’ budget came in around 15 percent. “We didn’t feel that we could come anywhere near providing 15 percent increase and being fair to other departments, other functions, and to the taxpayers.”
Pike said that after working with the schools, the current increase stands around 11 percent which would result in somewhere around a $400 increase to home property taxes. “In order to balance everything out across the towns, I encourage the School Committee, the School Administration, to work to find some solutions where we continue to provide the education we all want to provide but we find ways to make the numbers balance better. And I assure the parents that are sitting here, there is no one in town government that wants to sacrifice education… we all recognize that education in almost every community in Massachusetts is going to be 50 percent of the town budget,” Pike said.
Former School Committee member of 15 years and current Selectman Eric Crone also addressed the crowd. “One of the issues, obviously, when you’re making cuts, you’re making cuts potentially to programs, making class sizes bigger, or making it less desirable for families to send their kids to our school district,” Crone said. He pointed out that it leaves families with few options including moving or sending their kids to private schools. He noted, however, that charter schools do take money away from the town’s schools. “When that kid leaves our district and goes to the charter school, the amount of money that we lose, the expenses don’t go down, so if we have 10 kids leave and go to the charter school, you can’t lay off a teacher,” he continued.
Another former School Committee member and current Selectman Sheila Vaughn also spoke. “Every year we have to go up and I understand that this year is exponentially harder than most years because there are a lot of changes that we somewhat knew going into it, that it was going to be tough because of the preschool going over to Silver Lake and, again, like Eric said, special education cannot be cut… so when the cuts come, they come from the regular day budget,” Vaughn said. She continued, “We have to fund special education… Kingston has actually done a very good job this year of trying to stay within the budget, but this was mandated because DESE [Department of Education and Secondary Education] needed it to come through.” She implored voters that they need to come out to Town Meeting to make sure that their voices are heard.
President of the Kingston Teacher’s Association, and a 17-year teacher at Kingston Elementary School, Heidi Fox spoke on behalf of the educators of Kingston. “We love our students; we think of them as part of our family. We take pride in providing them with rich, high-quality education and engaging learning experiences. We instill within our students a love of learning, foster the courage to follow their dreams, encourage them to think outside the box and ask questions, and teach them to collaborate and be team players,” she said. Fox continued, “We understand that we are facing financial challenges. We’re all struggling with increased costs, however, by cutting our classroom-based staff, it strips away one of the greatest resources available to these children – their teachers.” She asked them to consider “trimming at the administrative level” rather than from teachers. Her remarks were met with applause.
Superintendent Jill Proulx spoke saying, “As we build these budgets, we had a number of changes that we were required to make and in addition we have been faced with rising costs like many schools throughout the State: inflation, rising costs of out-of-district tuitions, rising costs of transportation, rising costs to everything from paper to the crayons that the kids use. It is all leading to increases in our budgets that we are finding difficult to sustain.” These increases were presented in mid-March at a joint school committee meeting. The revised budget is a result of that meeting.
Director of Finance for Silver Lake, Sarah Hickey, spoke on the revised budget. She said that an additional 240 grant application reduced the budget by $170,944 and additional Circuit Breaker funding reduced it by another $869,655. Additional changes included a reduction of $290,428 from the salary lines and a technology grant that represented a decrease of $70,000. Increases included $413,556 in additional out-of-district tuitions and transportations. There was also an insurance adjustment which represented an increase of over $100,000.
Hickey said that Kingston’s assessment represented over a $4 million increase over the previous fiscal year. The total cost of education in Kingston is $29,818,034 which represents a 5.3 percent increase over fiscal year ’24. “When you look at contractual obligations… that is not just, yes, teachers have contracts and contracts including teachers increased, contractual obligations from my point of view… is the cost for the contract to maintain the elevator in the building… contracts for copy machines and printers,” Hickey explained. “The price for contracts has gone up,” she added.
Proulx said that they would be presenting a tiered approach to budget cuts that evening. Kingston Intermediate Principal Andrew Materna and Kingston Elementary School Principal Kerri Whipple spoke regarding cuts. They said that the first place they looked to make cuts was from supplies and other items that don’t directly affect the student experience. Whipple recommended funding an ELL teacher position from an E.S. fund (emergency shelter funding). Staff cuts include 6 paraprofessionals and 2.9 full-time unit A staff, likely including classroom teachers. Whipple said that despite the cuts, classroom sizes would remain under 30.
Like Whipple, Materna went through the tiered cuts beginning with supplies and materials and moving into staff cuts in Tier 3. If classroom teachers were cut, most class sizes would increase an average of 4 students.
School Committee member Jeanne Coleman said, “I would be comfortable bringing a budget to Town Meeting without any staff cuts and allowing the public to be able to support the staff; I’ve heard from not one person in town that has asked us to cut staff.” She advocated that everyone there that evening show up to Town Meeting to support the budget. Chair Timothy Lewis said he felt that additional cuts could be made to lines such as legal and substitute. “I believe there is other money in this budget we can save,” he told everyone. Coleman made a motion that they approve the revised budget without tier 3 staff cuts. The approved cuts in tiers 1 and 2 represented around $388,000. Lewis said he felt that they should be cutting more than that amount in order to be a good partner with the town.
Coleman noted that many people moved to Kingston for the good school system and that they wanted to be careful not to make cuts that would drastically affect the schools. Coleman also said that they recently did an audit on the central office which found that they were four employees short. “Not only are these administrators doing the work for our district, for Kingston specifically, they are also doing the work for Plympton, Halifax, and Silver Lake… they’re basically working around the clock and we’re already understaffed as it is,” she said.
Someone asked what would trigger a potential teacher cut in the middle of the year. Proulx said, “If we didn’t think we could absorb the areas where we had overspent through other line items, we would need to make a decision. With the budget freeze, sometimes we can’t make up some of those differences… it may or may not be likely which can sometimes trigger the School Committee to consider something like that.” Asked if that had ever happened, Proulx said she has never been a part of such a decision but she is aware it has happened in other school districts.
The motion to pass the budget with only the tier one and tier two cuts was passed with only two no votes. Coleman also made a motion to pass the Kingston School Committee budget for fiscal year ’25 at $14,568,739.78. Like the motion before, it passed 3-2.
The School Committee also held a school choice meeting. “School choice is a program in the Commonwealth where if the School Committee were to vote to approve school choice, we would be required to accept students from other communities,” Chair Timothy Lewis explained. The Committee voted unanimously not to accept school choice.
The Committee also voted to approve a grant of just over $12,000 to be used toward their nutritional program. Proulx said that it would likely be spent to replace outdated equipment.
KIS sixth grade teacher Dave Palana provided a Teacher’s Corner update. He said that the sixth grade took their first ELA MCAS that day and would take the second one the following day. Palana noted that they had the book fair for both KES and KIS. He also told the Committee that they have been trying to increase awareness of recycling through some different initiatives. Finally, Palana said that they have been working on different lessons related to the solar eclipse.
A PTO update was also provided where it was said that some modest funds would be seen from a Whitman-Hanson versus Silver Lake parent hockey game.