NORTHAMPTON — The Northampton School Committee has officially joined the City Council in supporting a resolution that seeks more equitable public-school funding across the state.
The School Committee unanimously passed the resolution during its Oct. 10 regular meeting, nine days after the council approved the same one.
By passing the resolution, the council and committee’s hope is that the state will eventually introduce a bill in the near future that changes the school funding formula for school choice tuition and charter school tuition, since the current one is inequitable, according to the two bodies.
“This resolution is to ask the commonwealth of Massachusetts to change the way that school choice tuition is funded, by underwriting the municipal cost of sending tuition for low-and moderate-income cities and towns,” the resolution states. “Northampton has lost millions of state aid dollars in inequitable Chapter 70 funding.”
According to the Northampton resolution, under Massachusetts’ current funding system for schools, for each student who leaves their public school district for a charter school, almost all the city’s per capita public school funding follows the student to the charter school, including the percentage Northampton provides its public schools above what the state legally allocates.
The resolution states that because students “choice out” from different classrooms, grades and schools across a district, the costs to operate the public school district remain relatively unchanged, making it difficult for districts to proportionally shrink spending in response to declining enrollment.
“The resolution is there to ask our state legislators to work with this fundamental idea that we’d be reimbursed for the cost of sending children out of district that are not in our public schools,” said former School Committee member Meg Robbins, who helped formulate a petition asking people to sign in support of additional state aid, and who spoke in front of both the council and committee about the resolution.
Because of this stagnation of state aid, the burden to allocate sufficient funding to schools weighs heavier on a minimum state aid municipality like Northampton, especially as education costs continue to rise.
According to the resolution, Northampton received just under $8 million in Chapter 70 funding in 2023 compared to $8 million in 2002, despite “a 20-year growth in district facility, insurance, transportation and personnel costs.”
“This results in local budgets that are challenged to maintain services and frequently lead to staffing cuts,” reads the resolution. “These cuts further perpetuate a downward spiral caused by loss of students to charter schools and wealthier school districts and a continued decline in school funding, loss of programming and increased demand for support staff and services as personalized student needs go unmet in larger classrooms with fewer staff.”
The resolution specifically implores the state to increase annual state aid to Northampton Public Schools by $3 million, since that is what has been annually deducted from Northampton’s state aid, as of fiscal year 2024.
During the Oct. 10 committee meeting, Jesus Leyva, a Greenfield resident who worked with Robbins on the petition, said that there a group working to galvanize surrounding communities and local legislators to pursue this fight.
Leyva added that Easthampton and Amherst are “tentatively” working on their own resolutions similar to Northampton’s.
“We are in conversation with a number of different local legislators and looking for a sponsor,” Leyva said. “The more school committees that have resolutions that have passed, the more likely we are to find a sponsor.”
During the Sept. 19 City Council meeting, Leyva noted that there are 211 districts that are minimum aid districts in this fiscal year and are not getting additional funding from the Student Opportunity Act.
He said this is “a statewide issue that affects a wide variety of communities, not just small or rural communities.
“Boston is a district that is hugely impacted by this that did not receive any additional funding from the Student Opportunity Act,” Leyva said.
The resolution was presented after what was a tumultuous FY25 budget season in which the City Council accepted a significant increase to the school budget from the previous fiscal year, and yet the budget still led to cuts to approximately 20 positions across the district.
“We know that $3 million back in the budget from charter school funding tuition would be just incredible,” said Ward 2 School Committee member Karen Foster Cannon. “It’s an incredible loss to our community right now and would have a really meaningful impact.”
According to Robbins, the Massachusetts Teachers Association is including this resolution on their legislative agenda at its November statewide meeting.
