The Northampton School Committee met to discuss the 2024-2025 school budget on April 11, 2024. A meeting recording is available at the following YouTube link: Northampton School Committee 4/11/24. Member statements from the April 11 meeting are included below.
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Member Statements
Mayor Gina Louise-Sciarra, Chair
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 4:27:38
First, I want to thank the students that came to City Hall yesterday, a bunch of you are still here. I was glad that I got to see you in the morning. I’m also just so grateful to all the students that came back after 2:00pm for a discussion, and I thank you all for being part of that discussion, and part of this discussion. I’m just very inspired by how much you care and I especially appreciated hearing the ideas that you shared with me and also appreciated how open you were to listening as well as sharing. I greatly respect and appreciate everyone who’s contacted us and shared their thoughts and their concerns and spoken up here, and I appreciate that you all are doing your job.
I’m just going to repeat what I said one day shy of exactly two years ago at this budget meeting because this situation we’re in is exactly what I feared would happen when we created deficits we could not fill with recurring funds. So I said, “I can’t, in good conscience, support something that I don’t know is sustainable. It would be irresponsible and I have a responsibility to the students at the district and the City of Northampton, and I cannot support something that I know will create a situation that undoes years of work to stabilize the school budget and to create security for the people who work for the schools and City and the needed services for the people and the students of Northampton.
Holley Ghazey, Ward 1
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 3:57:03
We’ve heard loud and clear from the community about the need for level funding, and I think that it is incumbent upon us to present this issue to the city council so that it can be heard and discussed by the entire community.
I would ask that everybody viewing this meeting and everybody participating go home and in the next little time talk to all the people that you know, your neighbors and acquaintances, who do not have children in the schools and make sure that they understand why we are doing this, why we are doing, because there will be pushback. Basically, if this goes through, it’s going to be cutting of lots of other departments citywide unless we can throw a Hail Mary and get Smith to participate in some kind of Pilot program where they pay in lieu of property taxes on a regular basis. They have like $500,000 in property that is – they’re nonprofits so they’re not taxed, but they also have two billion in endowments.
I know that they, I have heard that they have like a 4% budget Gap this year, but that’s because they just want to live on their interest. I also think that it is incumbent upon us when we make these recommendations, if I make this recommendation, if we were to make this recommendation, that we as a committee need to immediately start working proactively on figuring out ways to reconfigure and consolidate our schools to more efficiently use our resources, our teachers, and that may be closing one or two elementary schools so that you don’t have six classes at Jackson Street at 50% of their students at 27 or 28 before you even get move-ins. I think that we need to immediately apply to the MSRB, I think I’ve got that right, of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, who is the board that approves and funds school building, like what Amherst is getting, what Easthampton got. It’s a long process, but I think we should get our name in there immediately because for me, I envision something like having two K to 8 campuses that are new and energy efficient, and you know that we can more easily balance classrooms.
I think we should have an override. I do think that if it comes down to class size versus the Arts, that we should keep the Arts, because they provide such an enriching part to so many students, as we have seen here tonight by the very enthusiastic theater groups. I just can’t see cutting ESPs. I can’t. I’ve read some compelling letters about BCBAs who are the people who help intervene when kids just behaviorally can’t, you know, are so stressed out that they’re losing it. I also think that our student intervention staff, these are some of the ones that were listed in the additional cuts we’d have to go from the 8% to the 4% budget, and those that short-term focus, you know, they take students for six weeks that are sort of not getting it and are really failing in the classroom. They give them six weeks of intensive work and often they can return them to the class with those students having caught up and not having to fall further and further behind until we’re facing a special education referral to get support for that student. I also love restorative practices, so those are the things that I think.
Karen Foster Cannon, Ward 2
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 4:21:11
Thank you to my colleagues and to all of you who are here tonight. Member Davis, you said sort of what I was thinking. So many of you know I was on City Council for four years before coming over to School Committee, and one of the most painful experiences I always have found is this process where people think they’re not being heard when they are, and that’s really hard. We hear you. I’ve read all the emails, I’ve heard all of your public comments. We are listening. Sometimes that translates, it can translate to decisions being made that people didn’t advocate for, but of course, there are so many voices that we’re listening to.
The first thing I do want to say is that this process, and I don’t mean here in Northampton with this body, I mean this process, the way the schools are funded, the way we go through this every year, it stinks. Okay? We know this, we’ve all been here. I remember as a student advocating to keep music in the elementary schools, keep the buses within two miles, all of those things. That was in the ’80s that that started.
The other thing I want to say and one of the things that is difficult about this is the transition, right? Tonight was basically a love letter to the Northampton schools, that was a beautiful thing. I think that speaks a lot to our students, our ESPs, our teachers, our administrators, and the city that’s supporting our schools, that’s pretty incredible. It’s a very difficult mental switch to go from that to the numbers in front of us, and I just want to acknowledge that that’s really tough, and here we are in this position, and that’s a really, really hard switch.
The other thing I want to say about this is the human impact on all of this is not lost on me. So I actually used to teach, I was a high school teacher in 2001, and as we were talking about the notification of teachers learning that their job may not be funded, that’s actually why I don’t teach anymore. So I got that notice, and that was really unsettling, and I was very young. I remember some of the teachers were like, “Oh yeah, that happens every year here in the city.” It was not Northampton, it was a different city. “Oh, that happens every year, it’s okay, they’ll pass the budget and you’ll get rehired.” And that’s true, I was rehired for the next year, but that’s really unsettling.
This human impact, as we’re looking down a spreadsheet, and we’ve talked about that, but it’s the students, it’s the teachers, it’s everybody in the building, and I really hear that and just want to acknowledge just how difficult these conversations are.
The other thing that I did want to say is I understand the charge of the School Committee – here we are, looking at students first, schools first, and that is a guiding principle for all of us. Because I’m bringing the perspective of having served on City Council, the understanding of the child first, which is ever so slightly different than the student first. So I have had the experience of talking with people who don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods because there aren’t crosswalks, there are speeding cars. There is a child that I’m particularly thinking of who is unable, due to a disability, to leave his house and cross the street where he lives. That’s infrastructure money, and that’s what’s so painful about these conversations is this is all coming from the same wallet, right?
We’re thinking about the student first, the child first, and the city first, and all of these things, the arts department, that matters. If your crosswalk is painted, and as a middle schooler, you can walk into Florence Center on sidewalks that are in good condition and hang out with your friends after school. All of these things are part of the life experience of children in our community, and I think these things all really matter.
The other perspective I bring – is having served on City Council for four years – I did not see mismanaged fluff, and I’m not saying that anybody here is saying that there is. What I saw was department heads who were continually as creative as they could, reducing expenses, trying to meet the needs of our city. And it’s everywhere, and as we’ve mentioned, it is structural. Proposition 2 and a half, it’s BS, right? It’s not fair. It holds cities and towns to prolonging infrastructure improvements. It holds us to underfunding our schools. It holds us back from raising the revenue we need to fund our city services. It’s unfair, it’s not right, it’s immoral. It’s also immoral that we are funding our schools on local property tax. That’s not right.
All of these things, and I tell you, if we want to get on a bus and go to the state house, I am there for that, okay? I will be there, actually in a couple of weeks. I know we’ve done it, we need to keep doing it, and I am there to do whatever I can to support our schools.
That is to say, I understand the energy and the desire to bring this conversation back to City Council. I would not support that. I just, to explain, I won’t support that with the higher budget that is a motion right now. I would support it with a different budget that is above 4% increase. So I just want to explain my vote, and in no way does that mean nobody’s being heard, or that I don’t value the kids, or I don’t value education. I’m looking at the childhood experience of Northampton in a little bit bigger lens, that’s all.
Emily Serafy-Cox, Ward 3
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 4:32:00
I will bring up again my request for expanding multi-year budget planning. By expanding, I mean when we vote on a budget, we can only vote on that one year’s budget, that’s the vote that we make. But to have the multi-year projections along with that, I assume that that our administrators are doing that. I know I do that for my own nonprofit that has a budget, a tiny fraction of this amount, so I imagine that our administrators are doing that to integrate it into our planning.
I’ve talked about investments in communications, the kind of recruitment idea. I felt so much energy from, especially caregivers this evening, around wanting to make sure that other people know about our schools. If we are going to be continuing the kind of situation that this education system that we’ve created is special, if we’re going to be able to continue that, having students in it, it’s going to be critical for that.
I would see this as a call to action for our entire Community around recruitment. We’ve been creating these amazing, basically recruitment videos, you saw one tonight from Ryan Road that makes me want to go to that school. I want to have Forest Fridays. I should just go out in the forest on Fridays . . . to not just think of this as something that an administrator has to spend more of their time doing, but parent volunteer committees can do this sort of thing. I actually organized one such committee as this when I was a parent at my daughter’s kindergarten when we lived in San Diego, California. Let me tell you, Prop 13 is even worse than prop two and a half, so there’s a reason why I don’t live in California anymore.
Along the lines of bringing more resources into the district, I remember several years ago, Superintendent Provost talking about a grant writing position and it was actually added to the budget. I don’t remember what happened off the top of my head. I just thought of it tonight, but that’s one thing that I wanted to mention.
We’ve been talking so much about how this is a systemic issue. Obviously, this is not just an issue that the city of Northampton can solve on its own. This is a state and federal issue. If we as a school committee and as a school community are going to be a part of that solution, our school committee meetings can be opportunities for us to organize ourselves and to organize our community to build the power that is needed to really shift that, both for the state and potentially Federal.
We have a liaison for legislative work.v I think it shouldn’t just be incumbent upon one member to do that, right?v It’s, it’s all of our work together, but the key word there is together. We can’t do it just oh, I call up Jo Comeford and say, Hey, you know, we need more funding. It’s got to be organized. We need messaging. We need to work together on what it is that we’re asking for, and continually remind people to do it. Can you tell that I’m a community organizer in my professional life?
The federal issue can’t be understated here – not because the feds are going to magically somehow fund education, because they’re probably not. Our state is facing some major financial headwinds as well. Some people call it the migrant crisis. I think that’s a ridiculous term that – people are not a crisis, this is a work visa crisis. People need work visas, and it has cost our state a billion dollars in this fiscal year so far- in supporting people who don’t yet have work visas.
So the idea that in order to support public education, we need to pressure our federal government to get its act together on processing people for work visas? I recognize this sounds a little far-fetched, but there is a direct line because that $1 billion this fiscal year that our state has spent on people who are not allowed to work, because we won’t as a government process them quickly enough? That is is equal to the entire 7-year implementation of the student Opportunity Act. So, we’re talking about an amazing amount of money.
Those are all of the things I had to say. I really appreciate all of you here.
Michael Stein, Ward 4
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 3:50:00
I just want to make some comments about what I see in the room tonight. There are two things I’m feeling: I’m feeling really inspired and really proud of all the students, staff and community who really value our educators and are really proud of the work they do every day and we’re seeing with our children who are here, speaking so eloquently and advocating for their schools. I’m really encouraged by it, and really heartened by it; and I’m also really disappointed in this dynamic where it feels like people calling for a level service budget are not really being heard – they must be misled by misinformation, or if they only understood the cuts we’re talking about, and the budgets, and the fiscal stability plan then they would gladly accept the cuts. When I think in reality, there is a clash of values and a clash of interpretation of a long history, and I want to acknowledge that.
The other thing I want to say is that the process of getting here is not great and I’d like to improve it. Part of the problem is that we have a charter with a strong mayor and we’re often treated like any other department, and we’re not. We also have a rule in the School Committee that no member of the School Committee directs the work of the district or anyone in the district without the approval of the body. At no point did we vote to say we want a 4% budget make it happen yet that was the instructions given, like any other department so we need to rethink this process – because if I’m reading the room tonight right, I don’t think we’re going to go for either of these and we terrorized a lot of people and stressed a lot of people out, perhaps unnecessarily. So, we really need to talk about the process.
The other thing I want to say is it really upsets me that we were told that administrators or educators, these were the cuts they chose. I had to put in a freedom of information request in order to get the actual requests from the Principals in the budgeting process and I can tell you from finally getting them, that none of them requested these cuts. These administrators are non-union employees, who are in an insane position to not be able to say anything about this and I feel for them. I I just want to acknowledge that. I also want to acknowledge that people and especially children who make mistakes in what they understand about a very complicated budget are asking for engagement, not to be corrected.
The austerity driving the two budget proposals in front of us this evening has had a demoralizing effect on our community. Rather than dwell on the real and disastrous consequences either of those budgets would produce, I want to take a moment to focus on the incredible energy in this room and in our community. We’ve heard loud and clear from our community that they value education and that they want our City’s budget to reflect that back. What they are asking for is not radical, it’s not controversial, it’s to hold on to what they currently have. To be given the opportunity to keep swimming in place, okay?
As a School Committee, we’re responsible for advocating for the needs of our students, and tonight we need to send a strong message that Northampton Public Schools needs to be one of the top priorities of our District’s budget, and our City’s budget, and its funding needs to reflect that. A level service budget will send that signal. I am happy to participate along with my colleagues from the Budget and Property subcommittee in joint conversations with the City Council Committee on Finance to identify appropriate areas for cuts in other areas of the city budget and the possibility of using Reserve funds in creative ways. This work will help us both identify and demonstrate what our values are and produce a budget that reflects them.
I keep asking what expenditures in the city budget are more important than kids learning to read, or students with disabilities accessing education, or students packed into overcrowded classrooms? So far I have heard no argument – only that we have a fiscal stability plan that we need to follow and it stipulates a framework for how we allocate resources. The limits on how much revenue we can generate are real, and prudent fiscal planning is wise. However following a budget framework on autopilot that ignores changes to our needs and is inflexible is not a recipe for success. We need to re-envision our plan, articulate our values, and appropriately fund our many needs in the most responsible way. Our problem isn’t only, or even mostly a revenue problem. Our problem is a political problem and the political choice to underinvest in NPS over many years. We can make a different political choice tonight and have a real opportunity to do so. Our community is strong, our residents as talented as any community anywhere, and we deeply value education. I’m inspired and believe we can become an exceptional district.
Ann Hennessey, Ward 5
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 4:15:44
I do want to say a few things, and I love the comments, and everyone’s been reading a lot. I support sending this back to the City Council, and I know that that’s really hard for people, but I do think this is a community discussion around what trade-offs we have to make.
I’m going to try not to repeat, but I know I will a little bit, and while I loved all the students, I really do and what you said, I was actually listening to the students who weren’t here because as one of our speakers said, his theater teacher, I think that’s what he said, saved his life, and I think I could name teachers and counselors at our schools who saved some kids’ lives that I know.
These are people who had and continue to have such an impact on our students’ lives, and those kids aren’t as unbelievable as the student council in terms of confidence and agency and the theater group. My gosh, you’re so wonderful. So I kept thinking about those kids who aren’t here and how I worry about this budget. I really value tiered support specialists. They are . . I’m a special ed teacher and an economics teacher . . . they’re crucial. I’m here for the students. With that said, the contract is an agreement we’ve made with our educators, and we have to really honor that. So that’s something that I just want to put out there.
Long run, short run, again, I said I teach economics. I think we could fix some things in the short run in our community after we have a hard discussion, like a bond rating, maybe not really short run, but to me it’s easier to fix that than some of the devastating effects of these cuts on our elementary, middle, and high school students.
I know a lot of people in the community, and I’ve gotten a lot of letters, don’t support an override. That’s scary to me because I think we’re going to need it. And . . . and as many people here said – we need to participate in, actively as a community (and I mean people who live here, people who teach here, people who work here) in a long-term strategy session because we have unbelievable human capital that our paraeducators, our teachers, our counselors are amazing. I I think we have the potential to have unbelievable schools, more unbelievable schools.
If we think out of the box, this is a place to do it. Obviously, we’re in a systems failure. There are 212 communities in the Commonwealth who are in similar situations. We could be a leader, and I think we could be, we should be, and I think we have it. So, I support this going back to the city council at a level-funded level.
Margaret Miller, Ward 6
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 4:07:40
I am fully aware of the financial constraints that the city is dealing with, and I want to say that I really appreciate all the work that the Superintendent and our Business Manager have put into working on these budgets.
However, I have to say that I joined the school committee because I have a deep historic value for public education, and I really need our community to fund public education for our students. I so appreciate every single comment made by students and staff. I have read every single letter that’s been sent to us, every email. I’ve been up at night. This has been torture. I have to say that the reason I joined the school committee is to protect schools.
As Member Serafy-Cox talked about her history, theater and music saved me in high school, they were my safe space. I can’t even imagine cutting that. Despite my concerns about our financial constraints, I really am very committed to – we do need to really look in the strategic planning at how we can re-envision some of the things in the schools so that we can reduce the costs, including possibly closing elementary schools and consolidating. But at this juncture, I cannot vote for this budget, and I need to turn to the City Council to help us resolve this issue. That’s where I am.
Kerry LaBounty, Ward 7
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 4:19:16
First, I wanted to say thank you for all the comments. I really, really appreciated them. And I saw the students with their hands shaking and their voices shaking, and I wanted to say, though your voice be shaking, you spoke your truth. So I really appreciate that because that’s not easy to do. I just wanted to say I see you.
I also wanted to say I really appreciated, I think it’s Ms Hidalgo (I think I pronounced that right). She had a lot of ideas about possibilities of things we might have to consider, things we need to think about from regionalizing to things in the classroom. She really had some good ideas, and I want to have that conversation.
I want us to think about what do we need to do differently to make this work, because I think we can. We need to do something in the short term, and that’s not easy, and I totally appreciate the work that the superintendent and Bobby have done because they’ve done what we’ve asked them to do. So, you know, I appreciate that. But I also feel it’s a bigger conversation, and so I too support it going back to the City Council.
I just wanted to say thank you to my peers for talking this over with us. And it actually isn’t a difficult decision for me because I feel like it’s due process. It’s what we’re supposed to do as a School Committee, is advocate for the best budget we can. We may not get it, but that’s our job. So thank you.
Gwen Agna, At-Large
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 4:02:46
I’ve given a couple of speeches already in the last couple of meetings that I appreciated that Dr. Bonner included one of them in her newsletter, so I don’t think I need to repeat the kinds of things that I said. I just have a few comments tonight. I wanted to first really appreciate the students in Northampton schools. I have a special feeling about them because some of them I was their principal, but many of them I wasn’t the principal, and I really have had such great conversations over the last few weeks at different opportunities to do that. I’ve really appreciated your willingness to talk and to engage and to try to understand different perspectives. I think that that is a real mark of a good education, and I do think it’s something that we should be proud of in Northampton, that we’ve had students who have developed this kind of critical thinking and perspective-taking, and that you’re very, very kind as well. So, thank you very much.
I’ve also appreciated some of the letters that we’ve received in email. I know the pain, I know the feelings that families have. As our former superintendent said one time at a convocation, he said, “These are your babies,” and these are the people who you have to advocate for, and these are the children. And that’s so important to me to keep in mind.
I understand the reality of the city finances. I happen to see how Director Nardi has laid it out, and I think I understand it and accept it that we are in a situation that’s very difficult. I don’t see how we can continue to do business as usual in our schools. This isn’t new to us, this has happened before, and it’s going to continue to happen if we don’t do something differently.
And I think that if we are to ask the City Council to join us in understanding how we’re going to make our schools the schools we want to be, we have to pledge to the city that we’re going to look at our schools a little differently and our ways of giving education. I think we need to engage in the strategic plan and have a vision and mission for our children that I think will include further lobbying for more funding from the state, reimagining schools to encourage more students and families to come and enroll.
We need to support the initiatives for more affordable housing. It’s a huge problem for Northampton, and I think that that’s keeping many of our families away or has driven many of our families away.
I do agree that we do need to look at whether we should consolidate schools. I don’t know what that means at this point, I don’t have a complete vision for that, but I would like to speak to others who are more experts in the field. We have somebody who I know in our community who’s looked at school designs and is working in East Longmeadow right now. So I think we have a lot of resources in our community for how to reimagine schools or consolidate them – including our city buildings too, because we have a climate mandate and in order to meet that mandate, we’re going to have to do something differently.
I swore to, on a – it wasn’t a Bible, I think – but I swore to support the students the children of Northampton, it’s part of our code of ethics and school committees, that I realized that my primary responsibility is to the children. I valued that, I valued it as an educator and I value it now, and I think we are going to have to ask the city council to help us with this.
Aline Davis, At-Large
April 11, 2024
Video Time Stamp: 4:10:56
Again, several things that have been said I have word for word written down myself. So I’ll just go through them. One of them is, thank you very much for your comments tonight, for your emails, for weeks, exactly as Member Miller said. I have read every one repeatedly, I’ve highlighted, I’ve circled, I’ve wrote notes to myself, this is the same as that one, these are common themes, all of that. I would venture to say we all have done that, but I don’t want to put words in our mouth, but I bet I’m right.
The first bullet I have on here for my focus is – focus on the students. We are advocates for the students, but something that has been on my mind is we are also part of a larger community. We have our role, very important, but we are part of a whole city, which is very complex.
In my time on the school committee, I’ve increasingly understood more and more how complex it is. So I just want to acknowledge that I’m not sure where it gets me, but it’s not as tidy, not very tidy at all. Very important to me, I have no control over this, I don’t want to pit the schools against other departments. Firefighters are important, I think that’s important, I think the taking care of houseless people is important, I think that there’s a lot that’s important. But my job here that I said I wanted to do was on the school committee, so I get that that has to be my particular focus.
That in mind, I also don’t want to pit arts against reading, I don’t want to pit arts against math or science. Again, easier said than done, but all my best friends were the thespians in school, but I also, you know, I was a great reader and I loved my first-grade; like all of that is super important. I’m very concerned about any Special Education funding cuts. Very important, and that’s also a legal thing. The last thing I want to say…second to last thing, the must-do things differently, whether it’s closing the schools, the multi-age classrooms, the thinking outside the box, seems like imperative – have to have to do that.
So this is the last thing . . I only see dedicated, dedicated people on this School Committee who love children – and are working very hard. There is no clash of values here at all. You are heard, you have been heard, period. It’s very important to me that you understand that. Nobody is ignoring your thoughts, your concerns.