Mansfield School Budget Discussion Spurs Passion in Residents, Elected Officials and Administrators

The Mansfield School Committee, superintendent Brenda Hodges and school administers met with residents on Wednesday to discuss the growing concern about the current $2.3 million (before projected non-staff related cuts, which would, according to Hodges, bring it down to $1.8 million) budget gap.

“The first step is to find out what our real number is,” Mansfield public schools’ director of finance Edward Vozzella said. “We’re meeting in the beginning of April, and we’re going to look at if there are any additional cuts that we can make to our budget.”

Vozzella said that only after all the possible cuts are made to the budget that the board of selectmen could consider an override to raise revenue.

Many residents said that they would not be apposed to an override at town meeting, but they want to know how they can permanently fix the problem. For years now, the school budget has been coming up short before town meeting, and many residents are saying they do not want to go through the resulting “fire drill” every year.

“In one word, it’s a revenue problem,” Hodges said. “There’s not enough money to sustain the needs of the town and school as it is. When you say what’s the plan, we have grandiose plans for what the school needs to look like, the town has grandiose plans, but it all comes down to the revenue that we have as a town. When you say what are we going to do so we don’t have to be here every year, quite frankly? I don’t think anybody has that answer right now.”

Trowbridge said that one of the contributing factors to this is a major zoning change that occurred in the 1980s allowed major areas of the town to be developed. These changes gave way to a huge population spike after this rezoning. In 1970, according to the U.S. census, the population of the town was 7,773, but by 1990, the population hade more than doubled to 16,568, mainly, Trowbridge said, because of this development and rezoning.

“That was really the big boom,” he said.

With the current population about 24,000 residents, he said there are 5,000 kids in the population in the school system.

“We’ve been using Natick as an example,” he said. “Natick has about 5,000 students in their school system, but they also have about 35,000 in their town.”

One of the biggest points to the meeting was the fact that, out of King Philip, Canton, Easton, North Attleboro, Sharon, Foxborough and Norton, Mansfield and North Attleboro spent the lowest amount of money per pupil, $10,554 for Mansfield and $10,343 for North Attleboro.

“If we had what Norton has for per pupil expenditure ($11,679) we’d have $5 million more,” Hodges said. “If we were just at the state average ($13,371), we’d have $16 million more in the town of Mansfield to spend on education.”

Hodges said that in next year’s budget, teacher contracts and health insurance costs alone will go up about $1 million just to keep current level services because of inflation and health insurance rates. She and the school committee added that the town and school contracts with the unions still have be made jointly and can't be changed without major negotiations.

“The problem we have there a little bit is that we’re part of a consortium of 16 towns, so we can’t just dictate that,” Vozzella said.

Hodges said that the projected savings with current successful negotiations have saved the town about $900,000, but still costs would keep going up.

Hodges said that one of the issues that she came under fire from the town on was the expenditure of about $1.4 million in this year’s budget (2011-2012) from the Jobs Stimulus Bill on teachers, paraprofessionals and staff. She pointed out that the bill mandated the schools “must use the funds only for compensation and benefits necessary to retain existing employees, to recall or rehire former employees and hire new employees in order to provide early childhood, elementary or secondary education or related services.”

“This is what is says, I have to abide by it,” she said. “I couldn’t put in new windows in Robinson with it; I couldn’t put in a new track and field; I couldn’t spend it on anything, but staff. I could’ve given it back to the state... I’ve taken a lot of criticism, as have the school committee has taken criticism for spending that money the way we did. I don’t apologize for bringing six and a half teachers back to Qualters, I don’t apologize for bringing three teachers back to the high school, I don’t apologize for the nine [paraprofessionals] that we had to hire to be in compliance with our special ed regulations. That’s how we spent the money.”

One other issue raised in the meeting was the fact that there is a projected trend of declining enrollment in the school system over the next few years.

The projection is about two-percent per year, and administrators and school committee members argued that it is not big enough to alleviate the current budget situation any time soon.

Qualters Middle School Principal Zeffro Gianetti said that, even if the enrollment decrease were at 10 percent, removing teachers would not work in his current curriculum setup, as the school works with education teams of about 90 students and four teachers for those 90 students.

The system is set up so that those teachers deal with the same students day in and day out and are aware of each student’s particular needs at any given time. The loss of those six teachers added to the school through the stimulus money would result in much larger class sizes and much less personalized education.

At Robinson, the enrollment decrease is much more prominent, which is why the school committee voted last year to move two teachers to Jordan Jackson and one more this year.

Residents at the meeting had opinions ranging from all over, from the town must have an override to the town needs more money for infrastructure and lighting. Here are some summaries of what some residents had to say.

“You’re speaking to the choir,” one resident, parent and teacher in another district said. “The people here were very vested and supportive of you. But what I’m hearing from business people is that it’s like that everywhere, the economy’s very bad, people don’t have the money. I think maybe we need to work together to better explain where we’re coming from… I’m so tired of listening to town meeting and listening to people talking about teachers as if we’re looking as teachers to make money, we’re hiding money, we’re using too much money.”

“What do we need to do?” another resident said. “I’m willing to give a little, what are you willing to give back? If we’re talking about an override, then I’m willing to vote for it, just give me something back.”

“This is a very emotional issue,” Resident Tom Fuller said. “I am a school principal in a private school up in Chestnut Hill… I realize that there are a lot of studies out there that say class sizes doesn’t matter. That’s not so in this decade or this century, a lot more individualization is required.”

“Next year we’re in evaluation for our real estate and our taxes will go up anyway,” said Town Clerk Helen Christian in an unofficial capacity. “We need balance in this community. We can’t have the schools up here and the town down there. Our streets are a mess; our infrastructure is broken down. We need the school committee and the board of selectmen to get together and to hash this out and make it acceptable to everybody. We have a lot of unemployed people in town; I do the census, I see what’s coming in. We have a lot of elderly people in town; it’s not just school people. We have a community, that means everybody, not just school people.”

“We really look to all of you down here in the front to provide your leadership and the voice,” one resident said. “We’ll get behind you but we’re just really an amorphous mass, and Brenda, I’ve got to give you kudos, this is the most passionate I’ve ever seen you. You’re really laying it out clearly and passionately and dispelling myths and that’s what we really need to hear and see across the board. We don’t need to see pages and pages of numbers that crosses people’s eyes. Give us the bottom line in what we need in terms of our children. Emails, put it in the paper, letter to the editor put them in the newsletters. Unfortunately, you have to use every single mode of communication you have available because there are always parents who go ‘I didn’t get it,’ and they’re not going to care… I thought it was a ballsy move for the school committee has said they’re going in with an unbalanced budget because it got people’s hair up in a ball.”

“I just wanted to say as a parent who’s not a teacher I don’t want to see anymore cuts to the schools, I think we’ve done enough,” another resident said.