WILBRAHAM — The Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District School Committee is notifying its staff about the possibility of more layoffs in the fiscal year 2027 reductions, cited as allowing staff to prepare for the “worst case scenario” by School Committee member Tim Collins.
Additional staff will receive notification that their positions may be at risk of reduction if the budget is not approved by the towns at the annual town meetings.
An operating budget of $59.85 million was approved by the committee with Hampden responsible for $9.9 million and Wilbraham for $33.1 million in its budget roundtable on March 17.
Superintendent John Provost met with the unions and has already prepared pink termination slips for the staff who will definitely be affected by the reductions.
School Committee Secretary Lisa Murray said the committee won’t meet “the obligation of an appropriate amount of time” if staff aren’t notified and the budget isn’t approved by the towns. Provost added he didn’t know the legal parameters to declare a fiscal exigency, which is a financial emergency that would allow rapid reductions like layoffs.
“There is some question right now around whether or not the budget will be supported in both of the towns,” Provost said. “I think a reasonable person could argue you might want to take some, you might want to cover yourself at least a little bit in case it doesn’t pass.”
Murray said that letting people know ahead of time is the right thing to do, and that she and everyone on the committee would want to know if it were them. School Committee member Michael Tirabassi asked Provost if he had a number of additional proposed notifications and that he found it hard to “get his mind around how many.”
“I’ve imagined this in two approaches, one would be to include all of the reductions in that, sort of, two tiered list of cuts that I had brought, even though I know that you rejected many of them,” Provost said. “Those would probably be the ones that we’d be talking about again if the budget didn’t pass in one of the communities. That I think brought it down to a number that I believe, from what I had heard, probably would be sustainable under all of the scenarios.”
Provost’s other approach is to send layoff notices to all of the staff hired last year, adding there were about 10 elementary school teachers hired and a “number of secondary as well.” Tirabassi said it might be reasonable since “we have no idea what the funding gap is.”
“I have confirmation that Wilbraham voted to support the full budget that we proposed,” Tirabassi said. “We at least know that little piece of the puzzle … I think that Hampden will have to make some hard choices to be able to fund it.”
Tirabassi said that the committee could have a proposal to accept all of the reductions and that the teachers hired last year would be a “blanket to cover us, but I don’t really know how we would possibly have the students be taught if that many people were reduced.”
Collins said the notices should go out “as early as we can,” so if the “worst case scenario happens, these people have time to plan their lives and the schools have time to plan their adjustments.”
“When you lose a staff member, that’s going to change the whole makeup of the school and that takes some time as well,” Collins said. “My recommendation would be to, when you’re talking to people you can say ‘hey, here’s the budget we passed and these are the only cuts that will be required, but worst case scenario, we might have to cut this many, this many … this is why your getting the notice because we have to notify you and it’s only fair to you and your schools that they know this potential is there.’”
The process is being envisioned as two separate conversations, one being definite cuts that aren’t in the FY27 budget and then positions that might not be in the budget contingent on the annual town meetings. Provost said that if the budget does pass, the staff would be immediately notified to “come back.”
School Committee Chair Michal Boudreau said this was just a notification and not “an absolute that we are eliminating any position.” She said Hampden has not made a decision on voting favorably for the budget and that the public hearing is on April 21.
“I think they have to look at all the departments, and so we fit in as the school department that they have to look at,” Boudreau said. “My understanding is that the budget we put forward would impact what they are able to do for all the departments. I know they have not made a decision.”
