Elementary School Budget Short About $500,000 for FY 2025

Regionalization for District Sixth Graders Still On the Table

Report on the Meeting of the Amherst School Committee, January 18, 2024

The meeting was held in person in the Amherst Regional High School Library and simulcast on Amherst Media Channel 15. The recording can be viewed here. 

Present: Sarah Marshall (Chair), Bridget Hynes, Deb Leonard, Jennifer Shiao. Irv Rhodes participated remotely.

Staff: Doug Slaughter (Interim Superintendent)

Four members of the public were present in person at peak and seven viewers at peak followed it on Amherst Media.

Editor’ note: If you are confused about Amherst’s three school committees (Amherst School Committee, Amherst Regional School Committee, Union 26 School Committee), you can find explanations here and here.

Public Comment
Lissa Pierce Bonifaz and Molly Cooksey, teachers in the Caminantes (Spanish/English) dual language immersion program at Fort River, spoke on behalf of the bilingual language program and attested to its value, including how it promotes an appreciation of differences in language and culture, and  pride in culture that you don’t see in conventional ESL or assimilationist programs. Both spoke of the program needing appropriate funding to ensure continued success and equity for all who participate.

Manuel Diaz Gonzalez, a parent of a third grader in the Caminantes program, submitted a written public comment praising it and supporting its expansion into the Middle School.

Superintendent Update
Interim Superintendent Doug Slaughter expressed gratitude to Sasha Figueroa, who served as the assistant to the superintendent and will be leaving district employment shortly.. The district’s director of communications, Debbie Westmoreland, will be stepping in to assume some of Figueroa’s duties until a replacement is hired.

Slaughter announced that the Elementary School Building Committee will begin discussing playground design next week. Members of the committee will look at types of equipment and potential playground surfaces (see also here) with an eye toward safety and accessibility. Slaughter reported that the new school project is “on track and on time.”

Jennifer Shiao asked about plans for filling Figueroa’s position, given that Westmoreland already has a lot on her plate. Slaughter replied that there are no plans to fill it yet because the new superintendent might prefer to fill that position themself..

Caminantes Update
Katie Richardson, English Language Learner (ELL) Program Coordinator for the Amherst Public Schools, provided a report on the status of the Caminantes Dual Language Program at Fort River School. She reviewed the history of the program, its educational principles, the program’s successes, the benefits of bilingualism, and the challenges that the program faces going forward. That report can be found here.

The Program:
The program uses a 50:50 model of instruction in which half of the instruction is offered in Spanish and half in English. There are 40 students per grade, split between two classes. The program currently serves grades K–4 and is expanding at one grade level per year.

Successes Include:
Growing bilingualism and biliteracy across the grade levels in the program;
Demonstrated sociocultural competence and successful anti-bias education;
Native Spanish speakers regain interest in native language at home; Parents develop strong connection to program; and District better serves its multilingual community (30% of Amherst).

Challenges Include:
Busing. Since students come from all three Amherst elementary schools, busing can reduce instructional time as much as 30 minutes per day;

Staffing. Recruiting Spanish-speaking teachers is a challenge. And while ELL teachers support English Language Learners, there are currently no equivalent staff to support Spanish Language Learners;
Curricular Materials. Many are in English only;
Planning how to expand the program to the middle and high school;;
Sustainable Funding/increasing the budget

Initial FY 25 School Budget Presentation
Shannon Bernancchia, Assistant Director of Finance for the Amherst Regional Public Schools, presented the initial report on the FY 25 School Budget (see also here). The budget of $27,215,000 represents only appropriated funds and doesn’t include additional funds that will come in through the “consolidated spending” plan. The budget represents a 4.9% increase from FY 24 but will result in a shortfall of about $500,000. Slaughter described the budget as “difficult” with inflation impacting all categories, escalating insurance costs across all categories, and increasing transportation costs. Slaughter said definitively that cuts will be necessary and that “there are just going to be things that we’ll have to say we can’t afford to do.”

Irv Rhodes said that he would like to see a commitment to not make any cuts in instruction.

Sarah Marshall said that she agreed but that we need to recognize that we can’t run the system without administration.

Shiao wanted to know when the School Committee will find out what those cuts are going to be.

Slaughter referred to the budget calendar , noting that public hearings on the budget are scheduled for February 13 and the School Committee is expected to adopt the budget on March 19.

Slaughter offered a brief report on the district’s capital requests. He reported that for FY25, the district had made a modest request of about $310,000, reducing the ask by almost $200,000 from the previous year. He said that the district is requesting some modest improvements at Crocker Farm Elementary School and some spending on what he called “the energy master plan,” among a total of seven proposed projects. 

Sixth Graders Move to Middle School
Marshall provided a time-line of the plan to move Amherst’s sixth graders to the Middle School building in the fall of 2025 or 2026.

The Amherst School Committee voted on October 5,2021  to move Amherst’s sixth graders to the middle school in 2023 in order to clear a path for the construction of a new 575-student K-5 school. A space crunch at all three Amherst elementary schools in 2022 increased pressure to expedite the move. But in January 2023, then Superintendent Michael Morris proposed delaying the move until 2026 because of budget and logistical complexities and the following month, the Amherst School Committee voted to delay the move to the fall of 2025 or 2026. The other three towns in the district expressed little interest in moving their sixth graders or in changing the regional agreement to allow sixth graders to attend the middle school as secondary school students.

Slaughter reported that he has started to look at the regional agreement following his attendance at a webinar sponsored by the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools that reviewed the things that must be in a regional agreement. He said that Amherst is interested in whether any other community in the district could bring their sixth grades to the Middle School building if they want to do so and what that would entail in terms of changing the regional agreement. 

Changes in the agreement must first go to the State Commissioner of Education for approval. Then they go to the district communities for a vote; they must be approved in all four communities. Hence, changing the district agreement would require at least a six-month window, and the process of building support for such a change would need to begin soon. 

Marshall observed that the only vote that’s been taken thus far by the Regional School Committee is to allow Amherst to rent space in the Middle School building for instruction of its sixth grade elementary school students. Those students would continue to be instructed as Amherst elementary students and not part of the middle school operation. She said she didn’t see why the move requires the school committee to even consider opening up the regional agreement.

Slaughter said that the anticipated arrangement doesn’t encompass an agreement to share staff, programming, and maintenance, and that it may be more cost effective to do this regionally. “This is an opportunity to look at regionalization in a different way than we have in the past,” he said. “It might be a dead end, but it’s worth looking at. But it’s the School Committee’s call [about] whether we do that.”

Shiao said that the School Committee voted to delay the move (to 2025 or 2026) to give us the time to consider whether we wanted our sixth graders to be regional students. “The idea of having our sixth graders go to Middle School as elementary students is odd and an unusual model and confusing for families. I think most parents would assume that if their students were attending the Middle School it would be as Middle School students. So I think that this IS something that the committee should discuss,” she said.

Slaughter pointed out that the regional agreement was written in 1957, so it’s time to consider what needs to be fixed.

Rhodes worried that regionalization would take over a year but our sixth graders need to move by the fall of 2026 at the latest. He said, “We need to make that decision sooner rather than later. We don’t have unlimited time. We are limited by the construction of the new school and when the sixth grade has to be out.”

Shiao asked the chair and vice chair to lay out a timeline of what needs to get done and when (and that would include deciding whether Amherst wants to seek regionalization of the sixth grade) and report back to the School Committee, Everything in the timeline would need to be completed by summer of 2026.