The School Committee listen to Assistant Superintendent Jennifer Voyik as she discusses FY26 budget drivers.
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SOUTH HADLEY — During the School Committee meeting on Jan. 16, Superintendent Mark McLaughlin and Assistant Superintendent of Finance and Business Operations Jennifer Voyik provided a sneak peek at the fiscal year 2026 budget drivers.
Although Voyik said the district and School Committee won’t fully dive into the FY26 budget until the beginning of February, she still wanted to discuss some budget drivers that are expected to increase.
“It’s still important to talk about and to know where our big increases are each year in our budget,” Voyik stated.
Budget drivers for FY26 include transportation, vocation tuitions, salaries and special education services.
South Hadley has three types of transportation that they must consider including yellow bus, special education and vocational transportation.
Between all three types of transportation, Voyik said South Hadley is looking at between a 5-10% increase.
For vocational tuitions, Voyik said that students in eighth grade who are interested in an vocational program have until March 1 to apply and return the forms before potentially being accepted.
Since they don’t have the exact numbers, South Hadley schools attempt to track that the best they can, according to Voyik.
She explained the budgeting process, “We follow the grades so those students that are graduating off, we move everyone up a grade and then we track the applications that we know to date. Students usually apply for multiple programs, not all of them but a lot of them will apply to [Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School] and then they’ll also apply to CTEC and then they’ll put their name in for South Hadley High School vocational programs as well. When I budget, we’ll just budget for one of those, whatever the most expensive option and if they end up choosing a different option then there’s either saving or we’re paying that tuition.”
When looking at salaries in the budget this year, Voyik explained there are a couple things happening with salaries this budget cycle.
The first one is an agreement the School Committee has with the Select Board and with the town regarding positions they had that were funded with American Rescue Plan Act funds to help with the transition from some positions that were previously covered with Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds along with the addition of other positions.
There is a three-year plan in place to transition 13 positions over to the local budget.
“Part of a budget driver this year is we’re moving several positions from ARPA to the local budget for FY26,” Voyik said.
Another budget driver within salaries are union contracts throughout the district and step-ups that happen every year.
There’s a scale for every union contract so members of the union step up to a new salary range each year along that scale. On top of that, there is also a COLA increase.
Voyik stated, “It’s a budget driver every year, it’s also especially a budget driver this year because we are going into negotiations this year and so where last year you already knew where everything was set, this year it really is knowing what you have for funds and using that as a projection for negotiations.”
Voyik also talked about special education services and the budget drivers which included searching for a psychologist.
She said, “There’s a shortfall in psychologists in the area and so we have to contract out with a vendor in order to provide psychological assessments for all students that require that as part of the IEP process. When you have to contract out over hiring someone, the cost from what we’re seeing and what we’re paying can be two to three times as much.”
The current budget anticipates that South Hadley schools will continue contracting a outside vendor for a psychologist.
Another budget driver is out of district placement and Voyik said, “Not only do we have to take into account the tuitions that are associated with those out of district placements but then going back to transportation, you have a transportation cost that’s associated with any out of district placement.”
South Hadley applied for circuit breaker last year, which is the reimbursement system through the state for special education tuition and transportation that school districts over a certain threshold can apply for.
Last year, there were a lot of districts with the 14% increase that happened that were looking for reimbursements that were applying for reimbursement. Even though the state approved up to 100% transportation reimbursement over the certain threshold, the state only reimbursed 22% because there were so many districts that were applying for the reimbursement and there wasn’t enough funds for everyone.
Voyik explained why this continues to be a budget driver and said, “That’s always a driver. It’s even more of a driver when we can’t count on the full reimbursement that we’re hoping for because there wasn’t enough of a budget at the state level in order to fund that reimbursement to each of the districts.”
