The HWRSD School Committee looks over new strategies for the FY27 budget.
Photo credit: Erin Dowding
WILBRAHAM — In describing the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District’s fiscal year 2027 budget situation, Superintendent John Provost didn’t mince words — it’s a “disaster.”
Provost made the grim assessment to the School Committee during its March 12 budget hearing as he presented potential remedies for a projected $2.3 million shortfall between a level service budget and what member towns believe they can afford.
“I’m standing before you tonight with an extremely heavy heart,” Provost said. “In my 15 years of being a superintendent, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a budget this, as horrible as this one, and is going to do as much damage to a district as this one.”
The committee is meeting tonight, March 17, for a budget roundtable and vote.
At a March 5 School Committee meeting, Provost presented 31 different strategies, including raising fees and cutting funding to certain programs, to reduce the budget and bridge the gap originally projected to be $3.5 million.
Not all of the 31 strategies were approved and, after presenting the approved strategies to the Hampden Advisory Committee on March 9, Provost said he was told it still didn’t make the budget supportable.
“The overall effect of the changes that you indicated some willingness to go to last week would be to take the assessment for the operating budget for Hampden down from just under $1 million to about $650,000,” Provost said. “We got some indication at the meeting that something more in the range of [$500,000] might be the limit of what they could do.”
On top of reductions that have already been proposed, Hampden made an adjustment to its assessment, which means they will be getting $150,000 less from Hampden and $600,000 less from Wilbraham.
To build toward that number, Provost presented more strategies, and said the most painful one would be additional staff layoffs. This strategy would mean laying off three high school physical education teachers and restoring sections included in the March 5 cuts, laying off one Mile Tree teacher and one Green Meadows teacher. This would generate an estimated savings of $288,000, and an additional $15,000 from benefits.
“I guess I will say if there’s anything positive at all, one of the things that we would do in combination with this is take one of the cuts off from last week,” Provost said. “We originally talked about decreasing six sections at the high school of different subjects, yet to be determined. So if we did this, we would no longer need to do those reductions, but it is an additional five teaching positions.”
Another step toward $750,000 is reducing supply and technology expenditures by $102,500 —$12,500 in supply line items at the middle and high schools, and $90,000 in technology purchases. Students in sixth grade would also be issued used Chromebooks from exiting eighth grade students.
“I know there are concerns about the status of Chromebooks in elementary school, especially in Stony Hill,” Provost said. “At the end of the day, I’d rather have an extra teacher or two than 30 or 50 Chromebooks.”
He added that they’ve done everything they can to try to keep the cuts away from classroom teachers, “but when you’re trying to come up with over $2 million, you can’t do it, so we do end up with personnel cuts of more than 10 staff,” according to Provost. He said cutting 10 staff would save roughly $861,000, a number close to what the insurance increase is.
“That’s with reducing everything else, reducing the buses and everything we talked about before that we didn’t even put into this formula,” Provost said. “Reducing staff, which is inevitably going to result in increased class sizes, less attention for students.”
Before the additional $750,000 gap was brought to his attention, Provost said about $770,000 in potential cuts was presented to the committee, with about $373,000 worth of program cuts, including staff, to help reduce the total gap. It is also banking on $200,000 in state aid that has not been finalized in the state budget.
School Committee member Sean Kennedy said the state of the budget says more about the state than the towns, because the towns have been “really great in supporting our initiatives.”
Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Professional Learning Lisa Curtin and Director of Student Services Joshua Dickson described ways the budget will have an impact on their respective departments.
Curtin said the summer curriculum work for teachers, which looks to be reduced, is an integral part of preparing for a school year and is when teachers work on lesson plans or curriculum maps.
She added that another hit to her department was losing four instructional coaches, who provide support for classroom teachers in curriculum implementation and data analysis for the needs of students.
“Our instructional coaches over the past four years have done a considerable amount of work supporting classroom teachers so that they can support our students,” Curtin said. “That has a significant impact across all of our elementary schools, I don’t know how we would be able to support all of that work.”
Dickson spoke on the coaching reductions in the special education department and said the coaches have really helped support professional development for special education teachers around reading and math IEP goals. He said there haven’t been direct reductions to staff, and that it’s hard to make any reductions, but he does think everyone will feel the ripple effects for any reductions.
The committee met with the town’s Select Boards, the Hampden Advisory Committee, the Wilbraham Finance Committee and the Wilbraham Capital Planning Committee.
