 |
 |
Dr. David Hopson |
||||||||||||
February 26 , 2007 I heard indications of good news for schools and towns from some state legislators who were in attendance at a recent Massachusetts Association of Regional School’s (MARS) subcommittee meeting. It appears that although Governor Patrick has additional time to develop his budget (due at the end of February) we could see an early local aid resolution this year. What this means to our towns is that we’ll have a much earlier picture of state aid to our towns and schools to offset our respective budgets. Usually, we are all waiting on final adoption of the state budget to receive these figures. Occasionally, we have had to ratify our local budgets, including the school budget, before we knew what we were getting for state aid. If the house, senate, and governor can adopt an early local aid resolution in March, we’ll be able to reduce school assessments to a more realistic level before town meetings begin in May. There may still be additional monies coming to the towns when the state budget is finally adopted, but we will know the bulk of the monies allocated with an early resolution. To provide a recent, and very clear example of this, we only have to look at the 2006-2007 school year budget. When the school committee first began looking at this year’s budget, the average assessment to the towns was 24%, as we didn’t have an idea of what the amount of state aid (Chapter 70 and regional transportation reimbursement) would be. As the state budget process went forward we were able to make some educated guesses on the local aid figures and were able to reduce town assessments. However, the final state budget wasn’t adopted until after our local budgets were set and voted upon by the towns. The final state budget had additional money for educational aid that enabled the school committee to once again lower assessments to the towns. This resulted in a final average assessment of 9% to the towns (over the adopted FY’06 budget assessments)—a far cry from the original 24% envisioned at the beginning of the budget development process. This scenario creates additional problems with town finances and requires special town meetings to deal with the potential transfer of money from the school to the town side of the ledger. Given the acknowledged fiscal constraints the towns face, having these numbers earlier in the process would make much more sense in planning both the towns’ and schools’ finances. Early local aid resolution or not, I anticipate that once all is said and done the final assessments to the towns will once again be lower than the initial estimates would indicate. The school committee and administration is cognizant of this and has created budgets that have increased at roughly the same rate as town budgets over the past 5 budget cycles. Unfortunately, without a corresponding increase in state aid, a small increase in the school budget can lead to a larger increase in town assessments. In the end, to be able to afford a quality education for our children, the state must refine the aid formula for education and remove much of the burden from local real estate taxes. Without this change, we’ll continue to struggle each year to balance student and town needs on the back of property taxes, a regressive method compared to other available state revenue streams.
### |
||||||||||||