Public Comment: Here Are Some Things the State Can Do to Help Support Our Students

The following public comment was offered at the public hearing of the state’s Joint Committee on Ways and Means, on the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget, held at UMass Amherst on March 24, 2025.

As a School Committee member from a small town in Western Massachusetts, our meetings are usually uneventful. We sit in a quiet high school library on Tuesday evenings. We are a thoughtful group who listen well to each other and try to do our best for the schools. 

Now, we are in budget season, and our quiet library is no longer quiet. It is overflowing. We’ve run out of chairs. As many people as are in the room, there are more on Zoom. 

A few weeks ago, over two nights, more than 200 people attended our meetings. We heard seven hours of testimony. We received a thick book’s worth of written public comment. 

This feedback was in response to a FY26 budget that would cut 40 positions or a total of $3.5 million dollars across our schools. 

Parent after parent shared how valuable the people slated for cuts were. They detailed how so many of those individuals had made a real difference in the educational trajectory of their child or children. 

For example:  Parents and children spoke to support our instrumental music program, facing cuts for the second year in a row. A 5th grader described how learning to play an instrument gave her confidence to take on math and to be brave in social situations. Some youngsters performed.

Several parents reflected on how their children spent Kindergarten through 2nd grade lost at school, floundering, while classmates learned to read. Then their child spent a year with our amazing reading specialist, whose job is on the chopping block. Their children are now reading  at or close to grade level. One father spoke with emotion of how their very proud child was now reading to them at bedtime, and looking forward to going to school.

In any other context, these hours of testimony would have spoken to our district’s success. Instead, we faced heart-wrenching pleas not to let these skillful and vital teachers go.

The ambitious, hardworking teachers who will be left after the cuts also spoke. National and statewide award-winning teachers, teachers who partner with MIT, UMass, and Amherst College to create innovative and evidence-based programs for our students, told us they are exhausted. They cannot do more with less anymore. Their class demographics have shifted with more students, still impacted by the pandemic, with more needs in and outside IEPs and 504. Their classes are welcoming more newcomers who speak many different languages, but are not yet proficient in English. These changes are concurrent with their class sizes (up by six-eight  students in recent years) burgeoning to their breaking point. 

This year is a brutal year on the tail end of a series of brutal years. While we have had enrollment declines, they are outpaced by teacher cuts by 20%. For our middle school, we will go from 23 core teachers 10 years ago to 12 in the proposed FY 26 budget.

Principals presented the cuts to us:

• Our middle school principal, a former superintendent himself, shared he knew the budget moved away from the best practices model for this age group. 
  
  
• One of our elementary school principals, whose cheerful demeanor is famous in town – almost as famous as the fact that he climbed on the school roof when his students met a 50,000 book reading goal- called the proposed cuts “carnage”.               

Comments also touched on long deferred capital expenses. This month alone, a student at the middle school was injured by debris falling from the ceiling due to a leaky roof. And, another school, yes a completely different school, was closed for a day when asbestos was found in falling ceiling tile materials.

By the second night of our public comment, I found myself with tears streaming down my face. Now I’m a bit of a toughie, and not known to cry. So I felt embarrassed. Then I looked up and around the room. I was not alone. More people were tearing up than not. 

This years budget realities are not just breaking hearts in Amherst. While attending a Zoom meeting of School Committee members statewide, we commiserated about how many of us teared up at this year’s public budget forums. 

The budget situation is starker this year than most. Fixed costs have skyrocketed: transportation (10%), health care (14%), utilities (18%), and retirements (from when our schools were larger) are all rising in double digits. The state increases are not keeping pace. 

Despite the strengths of our schools, 26% of our Ch. 70 minimum aid budget goes to our local charter schools. They are expanding as our region’s pool of students shrinks. This leaves us nowhere to cut but closest to our students. We, a tough, smart, resilient and skilled group of people in a town and a state that pride themselves on education. Yet we are literally crying. 

I’m asking you today for four things: 

• Put this year’s Fair Share surplus funds toward the minimum aid/hold harmless districts 
• For low income and moderate income districts like ours, fund the charter schools directly rather than draw from our schools’ minimum aid
• Fully fund rural school aid including rural transportation 
• Increase Circuit Breaker for our children with extra needs 

Maybe, with a little help from you fine folks, we can dry our eyes and start to smile again and work together for our K-12 schools.

Bridget Hynes is Vice Chair of the Amherst School Committee and a resident of Amherst’s District 5