Responses to the PRO OVERRIDE Mailer

By Corinne Hogseth

Keep Acton Affordable

By now, you’ve probably seen the big mailer that The Other Side had sent to households throughout Acton. One doesn’t need to think too hard to pull apart some of their claims.

1. Acton reached their levy limit in 2020. Yes, this is true. But should we have? After all, Boxborough has stayed under their levy limit for years. They do have Acton to thank for this, at least in part. The school district’s budgets have been limited by Acton’s ability to collect more taxes since 2020. This kept Boxborough’s assessment down, as well. (Don’t get me going on the regionalization agreement, which was clearly a better deal for Boxborough than it was for Acton.)

The real issue here is that while school budgets were “only” going up by ~3% annually, enrollment was going down for the last 14-15 years. This article contains some background information about how we got here, including a graph showing enrollment going back nearly 20 years. Acton-Boxborough schools have nearly 1000 fewer students than we did in FY2009, a decrease of ~17%. As the number of students with special needs has increased, that means the number of general education students has declined even more than 17%. Check out the graphs and figures included in the school committee’s Budget Saturday presentation, page five. Although they only go back to FY2016, they are still very illustrative.

For example:

• Total enrollment has declined from 5,622 to 5,099 in the last nine years, or -9%. 
• Percentage of high-needs students has increased from 24.8% to 31.7% in that period. That works to a 16% increase in the actual number of high needs students.
• The difference is the number of regular education students. That figure has gone form 4,228 students down to 3,843 students — a decrease of 18% — double the overall decrease in total enrollment

(Any error made in interpreting the data provided by the district is accidental. Happy to make corrections if someone has a better interpretation of that data.)

• Staff compensation increases an average of 4% each year. Wow, that’s great for them. I haven’t had a 4% raise in quite a while. But more important than the size of the raise is the number of employees to whom it applies.  Referring to the enrollment figures presented above, we could expect to see that more special educators have been hired over the last decade — and they have. But shouldn’t we have expected to see the number of regular education teachers go down? 

I’ll refer you to page 20 of the Budget Saturday slides. That slide shows that while Total FTEs (Teachers Only) has gone up by 9%, the number of general education teachers has remained almost constant, with the exception of FY21. In that year they added 22 FTEs, probably for the virtual school that was offered to families who chose to have their kids attend school online that year. That is also the year The Other Side keeps referring to when they talk about the number of FTEs who have been pared from the payroll in the last few years. They’re cherry-picking the outlier.

So, the number of regular ed students is down 18%, but the number of general education teachers is the same as it was in FY15. Can you see where things are going wrong?

• Compounding factors led to a dire situation with available revenue falling short of projected expenses. Blah blah blah. 

The compounding factors were all raised at the May 2022 Annual Town Meeting — high inflation, a looming teachers’ contract and over-reliance on reserves while refusing to address structural issues related to declining enrollment.

Probably my favorite “justification” for the override is that we’re in the second year of the teachers’ contract. As if they didn’t know the second year would come after the first year. Seriously?? I hope they’re not surprised when next year turns out to be the THIRD year of the contract.

At the 2022 TM, an amendment to the school budget was proposed to reduce Acton’s school budget assessment by $1.25M, which represented our share of the amount of reserves being used to prop up the budget. It failed by a 60/40 vote, pretty close for a Town Meeting budget amendment. Usually, those are dismissed out of hand by those in attendance. But even with that warning from Town Meeting, the School Committee signed an agreement with the ABEA that we could not afford. (Noteworthy: one of the School Committee signatories on that agreement is the chair of The Other Side’s committee.)

And those health insurance premiums — well, the Acton Health Insurance Trust (HIT) had about $8M in it in 2018. The trustees decided that balance was too high and should be unwound. The only way that can really happen is if the Trust absorbs some of the premium increases on behalf of the town, the district and the employees. So, when they say they were “blindsided” by a 22.8% increase in premiums as of January, this off of a false base — the premiums never shouldn’t have been that low to start with. 

And as far as “diverting” $2M to pay for those unexpected claims — that $2M came out of OPEB (Other Post Employment Benefits), which is used to fund retiree benefits. With our reserves depleted to zero, the district and the town have set the precedent of using OPEB as their slush fund. Don’t forget — OPEB is also funded by property taxes.

• Cuts to Staff and Services When the Town Meeting approves a budget, it approves just that — the amount of the budget. While the School Committee makes a presentation laying out how this budget will be allocated, the fact is that once the budget is approved, the district can spend it however it chooses. 

So while they say they’re going to cut 80 teachers, they neglect to tell us they’re only cutting 2 administrative positions. And they don’t suggest cutting from areas that many see as not serving the core education of our students — Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) and classroom technology, for example. They also continue to highly subsidize all-day kindergarten, under the banner of “equity”. This I’ve never understood, as it benefits wealthy, white, dual income families more than any other group in town. That alone could raise ~$1.5M and save 10-15 teaching positions.

They also claim that these cuts will cause classroom sizes to explode. The fact is that classroom sizes would go back to what they were not so long ago. See page 124 of the Budget Saturday slides. These class sizes are also close to or within the guidelines included on page 22 of the latest ABEA contract. 

The school district claims that both the A and B budgets reflect cuts to “level services”, without defining what that means. I think for them, it means no budget cuts, period. What they don’t seem to realize is that AB schools have been providing ever-increasing services over the last decade, in the form of smaller sizes and nearly-free ADK. Can we get back to the “level service” of 2014 or 2019 and see how much that would cost?

The Town meanwhile, proposes reductions in staff in fire, police and clerk’s office. Reductions don’t necessarily mean cuts — it often means leaving open positions unfilled. And note that the Town has chosen to identify areas pertaining to public safety to make cuts while leaving DEI and Sustainability functions untouched. Without going down an ideological rabbit-hole, can we say this decision truly reflects the priorities of our residents, especially our seniors who may rely more heavily on our first reponders?

What is clear is that both the Town and the District are engaging in scare tactics, proposing the harshest set of cuts possible when there are certainly other alternatives.

• We haven’t had an override in 20 years. Actually, it’s been 19 years. But what does that matter? 

We serve hundreds fewer students than we did 5-10-15 years ago, so why isn’t it reasonable to expect the district to contract even a little? What’s so unfortunate is that this could have been done painlessly through attrition. Instead, the district refused to give up a single teaching position.

One need only look to nearby towns also dealing with overrides to see how this is playing out. Belmont just passed an $8.6M override; their high school enrollment has increased 24% in the last 10 years. On the other hand, Groton — which hasn’t had an override since 2002 — shot down a $5.5M override a couple weeks ago. Groton-Dunstable High School enrollment is down 21% in the last ten years. The voters understand that there must be some correlation between the number of students being served and the amount of money being spent. 

There’s so much more, but people will stop reading. (Thanks if you’ve gotten this far!) We all want to support our town and our schools. But many of us are also feeling the impact of a few years of generationally high inflation, high interest rates and a slowing economy. What has been noted in all media is the lack of trust Americans have in our government. If Acton’s leaders want to regain some of that trust, they must listen to us and learn not only to live within their means, but within our means.