The Pittsfield Public School Committee adopted a roughly $60.6 million budget last night under the city’s level funding. The budget cuts 75.6 full-time jobs from the school district.
The final adopted budget is $250,000 less than what was discussed at the budget hearing two weeks earlier.
That raises the number of job cut to 75.6 full-time positions — including teachers, paraprofessionals and districtwide positions.
The further $250,000 cut brings the city under its budget ceiling by just $31,000.
“This is the end of the process. It's the end of this body's process. Upon adoption, really, a new process starts and that's: Now, how do we do school? How do we do school based on this school budget? And I think we have a plan to do that,” Superintendent Jason McCandless says.
The district needed to cut $3 million from the budget because of the rising cost of health insurance and the city’s levy limit.
Pittsfield can’t generate any more revenue from taxes under the required 2.5 percent levy limit set by state law.
There is no override vote available to change that. And city officials say they can’t move around funds because every department in the city has either reduced or maintained its budget.
Employee pay raises, pension obligations, and the possibility that Eversource might raise electric rates hasn’t helped the city’s coffers or financial outlook either.
But, United Educators of Pittsfield President Brendan Sheran says the union agreed to forgo taking step raises for half of the year in order to save teaching jobs. Steps are 3 percent raises each year.
“And if you think about: Pittsfield, we are number 275 out of the teachers in Massachusetts in terms of pay out of 330 districts. That is a sizable, sizable gap for some of our colleagues, even in the county. But we want to do this to help save as many positions as we can to maintain stability,” Sheran says.
McCandless praised the teachers union’s $300,000 sacrifice.
“If you look at almost every salary schedule in the United States of America, teachers come in here, if they stay 35 years they maybe double what they came in at. This was an extraordinary and in some ways unthinkable sacrifice that our teachers made in order to keep more rather than fewer teachers in the classroom,” McCandless says.
McCandless then opted to further allocate $100,000 from the curriculum line to retain additional teachers.
That will drop the total job loss to closer to 68, if all goes to plan.
“Our total request to the city is $60,066,338," McCandless says. "We are asking you to use $620,000 of school choice revenue and Richmond tuition revenue toward our budget. And so the entire School Committee budget with our request to the city and with the $620,000 is $60,686,338 for fiscal ‘18.”
It passed.
That 0.4 percent reduction was attained by leaving unfilled the position of retiring Assistant Superintendent for College and Career Readiness – for a savings of $55,000. The school committee also won’t hire a elementary specialist who’d earn $45,000, and chopped curriculum spending from $500,000 to $250,000.
Some additional costs the school system faces are a $200,000 increase for out-of-district placement for special education services, and hiring a high school vice principal.
Mayor Linda Tyer, McCandless and other administrators plan to confront the state House of Representative's Ways and Means Committee on May 2nd about the city’s financial situation.
“We really are going to be relying on the state to help us with our challenges. And there are many things that have made it difficult for Gateway Cities in particular to thrive in the environment of Proposition 2½, in rising health insurance and lost property values. And so, we’re, we are really suddenly – it feels like the perfect storm is suddenly collided here in the City of Pittsfield in 2017,” Tyer says.
The School Committee is also calling for changes to the state's foundation budget for education, which determines the level of state aid it can receive.
The budget heads to the City Council for final approval.
