WEST SPRINGFIELD — Four town councilors stood by their school budget cuts, but it wasn’t enough to override the mayor’s veto, averting layoffs to five “interventionist” educators.
“The need for interventionists in our schools is huge, to make up for the lost academic ground the pandemic is partially responsible for,” parent Kelly Sudnick said at the June 17 meeting of the Town Council. “Please don’t fail my kids, and restore the proposed budget cuts.”
Though students may still be feeling educational effects related to COVID-19, the funding that hired educators and counselors to address those effects, a federal payment to all school districts known as ESSER, ran out this year. That prompted the School Department to shift several grant-funded positions to the operating budget, funded by state aid and local taxpayers, in the fiscal 2025 budget. The proposed budget also included several new positions.
After Mayor William Reichelt cut $1.6 million from the School Department’s original proposed budget, to present a nearly $56.57 million budget to the council, councilors on June 3 made an additional $1.2 million in cuts. Later that week, Reichelt vetoed $836,373 of the council’s cuts. The council failed to override the vetoes on June 17.
At the council’s June 3 meeting, Councilor Anthony DiStefano determined the size of the reductions by adding up the salaries of specific positions: a new content facilitator, a new math director, three existing math interventionists, two existing reading interventionists, and four new teachers at the middle school. On June 17, councilors acknowledged that under state law, the council cannot demand specific changes to the school budget, but can only cut the bottom line. Councilor Daniel O’Brien criticized school officials for planning, if the veto had been overridden, to lay off the educators in the positions DiStefano had named.
“You could also cut administrators. They make a lot of money,” O’Brien said. “You don’t have to start cutting teachers, if you’re going to cut anything.”
Reichelt made the case that West Springfield spends significantly less per pupil than neighboring school districts. He said Agawam and Longmeadow, for example, spend about 45% more than the “foundation budget,” each district’s minimum budget mandated by the state. West Springfield is just about 5% over its minimum, he said.
Councilor Michael LaFlamme said the statistics cut the other way, too. The mayor’s comparison districts, Agawam and Longmeadow, also have higher median incomes than West Springfield — and thus, LaFlamme said, a higher capacity to shoulder increased taxes.
“I look at people in poverty trying to make ends meet,” he said. “This will be another 5% increase” in property taxes, he said, and “that is a big chunk of change for those seniors that are not getting that type of increase into their Social Security, or people living on a fixed income, like disability.”
DiStefano said he has to compare the School Department to the other departments in town, like the police and public works, which generally saw increases between 1% and 4% over their FY24 budgets. The School Committee, on the other hand, initially passed a budget with a 14% increase before the mayor’s cuts reduced it to a 9.6% hike. The council’s cuts would still have been an 8% increase from the previous year’s spending, DiStefano said.
“We have to ask where we can save some money,” DiStefano said. “The asks are never going to stop. Seniors want a new Senior Center. Police Department wants a new Police Department. Fire Department needs things. We’re talking about possibly having to renovate or build another school … There are times when we need to say, hey, maybe this time we can’t do everything.”
The cuts were made in two groups, totaling $586,373 and $250,000, so two override votes were taken. Both veto overrides failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds support — six members of the nine-member council — though they did garner simple majorities of the seven councilors eligible to vote. In both votes, councilors Fred Connor, DiStefano, LaFlamme and O’Brien voted in favor, while Brian Clune, Brian Griffin and Sean Powers voted against. Councilors William Forfa and Jaime Smith, because they have family members working for the School Department, did not participate in the discussion or the votes.
