By Cathleen Mitchell

Our schools are in the midst of a budget crisis. One of the statements that has been uttered and written many times recently in this context is that school expenses are rising while enrollment is falling. This is often said with puzzlement, or even an insinuation that our schools are wasting money.

Given how complicated school costs and education funding are, it is understandable that many people have settled on this conclusion, rather than taking the time to truly examine the problem. However, when one really digs into the data and the complexities of state funding formulas, what emerges is not a picture of schools that should be able to do more with less, but of schools with the deck stacked against them, schools that have a funding problem, not a spending problem.

Our schools are facing daunting financial challenges over which district leadership has very little control. Below is a summary of some of them.

Inflation and Rising Personnel Costs

Our schools’ costs are increasing predominantly because education costs are not immune to the same inflationary pressures impacting other sectors of the economy. This can be seen in rising per-pupil costs across Massachusetts as well as increasing per capita costs for other town services in Amherst. Between 2012-2022, for example, Amherst-Pelham Regional Schools (ARPS) per-pupil costs increased 34% while the Public Safety and Library budgets per capita increased 28% and 32% respectively. During this same time period, Massachusetts’ average per pupil spending rose a much larger 48%.  

Personnel costs, the largest driver of school spending, are rising both in schools across Massachusetts and actually in most of Amherst’s municipal departments, too. Teachers’ salaries in our schools are in line with state averages, and increases in these salaries over the last decade (2011-2021) mirror average salary increases in other municipal departments in Amherst such as Police and Fire/EMS. Even these relatively modest increases are putting incredible pressure on both school and municipal budgets. In fact, Amherst’s FY25 municipal budget shows many departmental increases well beyond the 6% the regional schools requested, specifically “due to projected step and cost of living wage adjustment increases and other collective bargaining increases”. Without competitive salaries, school districts cannot attract and retain qualified teachers, resulting in staffing issues. This is something already impacting Amherst schools and has led some other districts to take the extraordinary step of increasing teacher pay mid-contract to combat this problem. It is simply very difficult for any personnel-dependent sector to control costs in the current economic climate. In a Finance Committee budget meeting this spring, Amherst’s Chief of Police described challenges in recruitment and retention, the financial costs associated with staff turnover, and problems that arise from understaffing, without any push back from Finance Committee members–why would the education sector be any different?

Even as Amherst’s student enrollment has declined, the remaining students have, on average, become more expensive to educate.

While the overall student population in Amherst’s schools has declined over the last 20 years, the number of students who require extra services (English language learners, students with disabilities, low-income students) has not.  This increasing proportion of higher-need students contributes to rising per pupil costs in our schools.  And, as minimum-aid districts (those with declining enrollment), the state aid that our schools receive does not adequately account for these costs. 

Shrinking school districts like ours are unable to decrease operating costs as quickly as enrollment declines.

Our schools’ population is shrinking for many reasons (lower birth rates; Western Massachusetts losing population generally; residents opting for charter schools, public school choice and private school; insufficient availability of affordable family housing). When enrollment declines, pupil loss is spread across schools and grades making it difficult to reduce teaching positions and other fixed costs. Both Amherst and ARPS have significantly cut teaching staff over the past twenty years (25% in Amherst and 35% in ARPS) in response to declining enrollment, but other expenditures are harder to reduce. School districts with declining enrollment continue to have legacy costs from their high pupil days, such as retiree benefit payments to the larger number of teachers they used to employ, as well as heating and cooling costs for school buildings, which are not easily downsized. These are just some of the reasons that small regional and rural school districts that are contracting have higher operating costs per pupil than the state average.

Charter schools are a significant driver of shrinking enrollment, and the current charter reimbursement model greatly disadvantages our schools.

When a student leaves our public schools for a charter school, we send all of the state aid and most of the local assessment with the student. This is true even if the receiving charter schools’ per pupil expenditures are lower than in our schools. In many cases, this cost differential is significant in part because our schools educate a large proportion of high-needs students (ELL, students with disabilities, low-income) whereas many charter schools do not. While charter schools select students by lottery, many do not offer the special education supports, especially intensive need programs, that make them a feasible choice for all students.  

Taken together, Amherst and ARPS send almost $4 million dollars a year in tuition to charter schools, and yet cannot reduce their budgets by that same sum. Charter schools draw students away from school districts in a way that is spread across the district, making it difficult for districts to proportionally shrink in response. Schools cannot eliminate a fraction of a teacher or stop heating a fraction of a classroom. As more students leave, districts are forced to reduce course offerings and other support services and programs, which in turn drives more students away to the charter schools. Western Massachusetts has a disproportionate number of charter schools per capita compared to the eastern part of the state, making the burden on our school districts that much greater.  

State-aid formulas do not account for the true cost of education and municipalities are being asked to pay an increasing portion of rising costs.

State-aid to local school districts is calculated as a percentage of the amount the state considers to be the minimum needed to adequately educate students (the foundation budget). However, formulas used to determine the foundation budget undercount critical costs in areas such as employee benefits, special education and transportation, resulting in foundation budgets that do not accurately reflect the cost of educating students, especially in communities like Amherst. And even when the state has made small (but insufficient) increases in the foundation budget or minimum aid to partially account for rising costs, it has turned around and required municipalities to pay a growing share of costs, with state support shrinking every year. Amherst is paying a huge share of local education costs, on par with the wealthiest communities in Massachusetts. As a community, we feel an increasing burden because we are, in fact, being asked to pay more every year.  

Recently, many advocacy groups and state legislators have been vocal about the inequities and inadequacies of school funding, especially in Western Massachusetts, and the devastating impact on our schools. The Massachusetts Municipal Association, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, the Massachusetts School Committee Association, the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, the Rural Schools Coalition, and Senators and Representatives from Western Massachusetts including Senator Jo Comerford, Representative Mindy Domb, and Representative Natalie Blais have all been outspoken on these issues.  

There are potential reforms in the pipeline that could help Amherst, but seeing them through to fruition will require community advocacy. The precursor to community support, though, is a shared acknowledgment of the challenges facing our schools, grounded in facts, and a willingness to work as a community to make our schools better. It is imperative that we do this, not just for our children but for the entire community. 

Cathleen Mitchell has lived in Amherst for the past two years and is a parent of two children in the Amherst/Amherst-Pelham Regional Schools.