Pembroke voters rejected a $3 million school budget hike last year. What has that meant for students and teachers this year?

Pembroke Academy Spanish teacher Reilly Paquin monitors her class during a test in one of her classes on Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Paquin finds it challenging to find time for one-on-one conversations with her students due to the increase in class size.

Pembroke Academy Spanish teacher Reilly Paquin monitors her class during a test in one of her classes on Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Paquin finds it challenging to find time for one-on-one conversations with her students due to the increase in class size. GEOFF FORESTER—Monitor staff

Pembroke Academy Spanish teacher Reilly Paquin monitors her class during a test in one of her classes on Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Paquin finds it challenging to find time for one-on-one conversations with her students due to the increase in class size.

Pembroke Academy Spanish teacher Reilly Paquin monitors her class during a test in one of her classes on Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Paquin finds it challenging to find time for one-on-one conversations with her students due to the increase in class size. GEOFF FORESTER—Monitor staff

Pembroke Academy Spanish teacher Reilly Paquin monitors her class during a test in one of her classes on Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Paquin finds it challenging to find time for one-on-one conversations with her students due to the increase in class size.

Pembroke Academy Spanish teacher Reilly Paquin monitors her class during a test in one of her classes on Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Paquin finds it challenging to find time for one-on-one conversations with her students due to the increase in class size. GEOFF FORESTER—Monitor staff

GEOFF FORESTER—Monitor staff

By JEREMY MARGOLIS

Monitor staff

Published: 12-25-2024 3:30 PM

Modified: 12-26-2024 12:21 PM


Pembroke Academy Spanish teacher Reilly Paquin’s grade book is filling up fast.

Halfway through the school year, the tenth-year teacher has resorted to providing written rather than verbal feedback at least a dozen more times than she ordinarily would by this point.

“I’m constantly making decisions, because I have so many kids in my classes that I don’t have the time to be like, ‘Hey, you can come over and have this conversation with me for 10 to 15 minutes,’” said Paquin, who teaches all five sections of sophomore-level Spanish.

In a typical year, her total student load ranges from 80 to 90 students. This year – after the district eliminated one of four Spanish teaching positions following the rejection of a proposed budget increase – she has 118 students.

The students taking Spanish are comparatively lucky. In the new year, those taking French – the other language offered at Pembroke Academy – will log on to the virtual learning academy, VLACS – not because a French teaching position was eliminated, but rather because they couldn’t fill it after a teacher left the school.

Such is the new normal in Pembroke’s three schools after voters chose last March to reject a $3 million budget increase proposed by the school board. Since then, 27 positions have been eliminated and another 25 educators have left of their own volition, according to a document prepared by administrators, with some citing the uncertain long-term budget climate in the district.

Roughly 17% of the 130 classroom teaching positions in the district have been affected in some way, though some have since been filled.

The upheaval has risen to the very top of the district. Earlier this month, the district’s superintendent and the high school’s headmaster announced they would leave at the end of the year, with the latter citing the district’s budget woes as one factor behind his decision. Over the summer, the principal of the middle school left after only one year in the district.

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The loss of so many educators has led administrators to discontinue courses at the high school, consolidate language arts and reading classes, reduce physical education and extra support at the middle school, remove paraprofessionals from kindergarten classes, and eliminate a popular program called iLab at the elementary school, according to the document prepared by administrators.

The impact has increased the workloads of educators by raising class sizes and stretching them thin, according to Kristin Doyle, the co-president of the Pembroke teacher’s union.

“We have unbelievable educators that are working extremely hard to make sure that our kids are given a stellar education,” said Doyle, who teaches social studies at the high school. “And they continue to take things on – I think maybe to the detriment of their own health – trying to ensure that our students are being given the best education possible.”

Pembroke is not the only district to experience significant budget challenges. Driven in particular by increases in the costs of providing special education services and transportation, as well as by inflation, nearly every school district in the state has seen its budget grow in recent years – sometimes raising taxes on a modest home by $1,000 or more per year.

Yet Pembroke stands alone among districts in the area in bucking the recommendation of its school board so dramatically at its annual meeting last spring. Voters elected to keep this school year’s budget level with last year’s, rejecting a proposed 10% increase.

Prior to that move, Pembroke’s budget had grown 21% in the preceding five years. From 2019 to 2023, the most recent year for which the Department of Education has statewide data, Pembroke’s budget grew at nearly the same rate as total state spending on education.

Outgoing Superintendent Patty Sherman said in an interview that Pembroke continues to provide a “high-quality education,” but she acknowledged the in-classroom experience looks different this year than it typically does.

“If you increase class sizes and remove the support that the teachers have access to in their classrooms, then they’re going to be less able to spend individual time with students,” Sherman said.

The impact has been particularly pronounced in the elementary school’s four kindergarten classrooms, which historically have each had a paraprofessional in addition to the classroom teacher but do not this year.

“You’re talking about five- and six-year-olds in a class with toileting needs and supervisory needs,” Sherman said. “They don’t know their way around the school when they first come. They need to be walked. If they need to leave the room, they have to be escorted. So it’s definitely put a strain on the teachers who are left with less support.”

At the middle school, language arts and reading classes have been consolidated. That has led sixth-grade science teacher Ian West to take on teaching literacy skills to some extent in his own classes. Combined with class sizes that have grown from an average of around 16 students in his previous seven years as a teacher to 19 this year, he said there is less time for course material this year.

“You put more 11-year-olds in the room, there’s just naturally going to be more people talking, more people moving, and so there’s management that goes with all of that,” West said.

Former Pembroke selectman Peter Gagyi, who supported keeping the budget steady last spring, said the ramifications of that decision are about as he expected them to be. He believed the vote was necessary to send a message to the school district that the balance between taxpayers’ and students’ needs had grown out of whack.

“I think that they really had to look closely at what to do with the money that they were getting, and they weren’t used to having to do that task, in my opinion,” Gagyi said.

It remains to be seen what the long-term impact will be on students. Test scores for this year, the most commonly used metric to measure student performance, will not come out until next fall.

By then, residents will have already voted in March on a school budget for the next year. 

“If what happens last year happens again – and I hope it doesn’t – what is going to happen to our kids in this town?” asked West.

“We have pulled together and I think done a stellar job of keeping up our standards for our students and keeping the quality of our education high,” West added. “Can we do that again if more was to be cut? I don’t know.”

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.