Running their fingers along the lines of a spreadsheet outlining staff cuts, Concord teachers and administrators fidgeted and shared heavy glances at the school board’s meeting Monday night meeting.
They had reasons to: The Concord Board of Education agreed to post for public discussion a spending plan that would pull about 35 positions from the district’s payroll in 2027.
While not a finalized budget, the plan would bring salary and benefit expenses down $4.1 million from the first draft of the school budget, chipping away at a $17 million shortfall with the help of another $6.8 million in non-staff reductions. Other cuts are still being discussed.
Faced with a severe financial picture, Board President Pam Walsh lamented the district’s difficult position.
“This budget sucks. I’m just going to say it. It’s horrible. This is not why I ran for the school board,” Walsh said Monday night. “But I also know that we cannot offer a 25% tax increase to the people in this community. They can’t afford that.”
The proposed arrangement leaves the district’s spending nearly flat. It adds just $30,000 to district operating costs from the current year and reduces overall expenditures to just under $124 million.
Even so, since district revenue is underwater, a budget following this plan would still carry an estimated 12% hike in taxes, or a $1.78 increase to the current local tax rate. The citywide revaluation will complicate what that means for homeowners and landlords, but in a normal tax season, that hike would amount to a $712 increase for a property valued at $400,000.
The school board has a goal of increasing the local school tax rate by no more than 5%. To get there, it would still need to make $5 million more in deductions, and hitting that target increasingly looks like an outcome board members cannot stomach.
Few details were available about the kinds of staff that the cuts would affect, but Superintendent Tim Herbert said Monday that the reductions would span all of the district’s unions.
“Everybody is going to be impacted by this,” Herbert said.
The posted plan proposes three different rounds of staff adjustments, with Concord High School seeing the largest number of positions cut, 12, plus another position cut at CRTC.
About nine positions, most of them classroom teachers, would be cut across the district’s five elementary schools, though not equally from each school.
This would keep the district well within its class size boundaries, according to projections for next year, with Kindergarten classes as the exception. Starting enrollment is tough to predict, but if it continues to rise, most schools’ kindergarten classes would land near the upper limit of the district’s class size policy, which is 20 students for that age group.
These deductions would also involve freezing two vacant assistant principal positions at the elementary level, according to an online post by Walsh. This would mean that the five schools would share three assistant principals. Central office administrators, she noted, also opted not to take raises for next year.
The posted budget will go up for public discussion at hearings on March 23 and 25 at 6 p.m., the first at Mill Brook and the second at the board’s meeting room. The March 23 meeting will begin with a hearing on a potential open enrollment policy for next year.
It’s likely that this arrangement will change.
“We’re not just talking about tax rates and numbers, we’re talking about people,” said Cara Meeker, the board’s new vice president. “I’m not sure tonight is the night to argue for specific positions; we will have opportunities to do so with community feedback.”
Notably, school administrators have floated another $2.5 million in further, more complicated staff reductions that would impact senior, longtime employees. Many of those reductions would involve early retirements and buyouts, and it’s not clear yet whether employees would accept them.
The $6.8 million non-staff reductions comes from an array of changes, including a debt plan on the middle school project that would pay only interest in the first year and a plan to discontinue sending students to Second Start. Longer payment plans on new curriculum programs would provide other savings, as well as the use of instructional reserve money to help pay off a surprise health insurance bill from last year.
Many districts across the region are managing higher insurance rates, utilities and special education services. It’s also standard for local schools’ daily costs rise faster than state funding, putting more acute strain on local property owners.
The capital city, however, was hit especially hard this year.
Concord will see an overall decline in state education funding of about $2.8 million, according to district data, largely because of a significant increase in the city’s state-calculated equalized property valuation.
Under one portion of the state’s education funding formula, called the extraordinary needs grant, municipalities with more property value and fewer low-income students get less state help. Many districts don’t get any funding from this portion, but a jump in Concord’s equalized value means the district can expect far less than it currently gets.
This has puzzled district officials, since the city’s overall property value was flat in the current budget year.
Concord is also building a new, $155 million middle school. While the bond structure shifts much of the debt payment off of the first year, the project still weighs down the budget. The bond is not yet finalized, but estimated interest alone is just shy of $3.5 million for the first year.
Reserve spending is also to blame: This fall, the district had to double dip into its savings to cover surprise and mandated increases in health insurance and special education, among other things. Other districts also shouldered these rising costs, but they hit Concord harder than most of its peers.
On the whole, Concord’s slow-growing tax base is also undergirding this year’s pinched budget. The same pool of property owners is on the hook for growing expenses, as development moves more slowly than expected and several properties have been pulled from the tax rolls in the last few years.