The recent public discourse about the FY26 Somerville Public Schools budget has proven to be a big deal in our community, and I appreciate everyone who took the time to send their thoughts to me as their Councilor-At-Large. In conversations with the community, one thing that has come up over and over is a question about how appropriately we are funding our schools.

On one hand, we hear routinely about Somerville's high level of investment in our schools, relative to the region. The latest figures available from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) have Somerville ranking fourth out of 21 MAPC Inner Core communities in per-pupil spend as of 2023 -- prior to subsequent increases of 7.9 percent in FY24, 6.8 percent in FY25, and 5.2 percent in FY26.

With only Cambridge ($38,932.89), Boston ($31,882.82), and Watertown ($27,612.04) spending more per pupil than Somerville among MAPC Inner Core communities, how then are we supposed to square this with the stories of inadequate funding we heard during the School budget process from families and educators? It seems obvious to me that Somerville is spending significantly better than the vast majority of our neighboring communities and American society as a whole is failing to fund public education anywhere close to the level we should. 

We're seeing the unfortunate results of that failure playing out across our country as Americans' lack of media literacy and critical thinking skills have seen large segments of our country fall prey to misinformation that's threatening our republic. There's been a really regrettable war being waged on public education for decades, and we're really feeling the impacts of that.

Our schools are emerging from a pandemic that impacted students very differently, and school districts each handled Pandemic Era decisions in their own ways. From the initial jump to virtual classes when the pandemic hit to the resumption of in-person learning -- to how Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) monies were utilized and how those new positions and initiatives were preserved when ESSER funding ended -- Somerville Public Schools has forged its own path as a district.

So the question ultimately is: What should we be doing for our schools here in Somerville?

I've heard loud and clear the calls for increasing investment in our schools from fellow SPS parents and I'm thrilled to see the advocacy for our children and for our educators. I've followed this process closely and my main questions remain what specifically we want to see funded better in order to "fully fund" SPS, and how this all fits in with an FY26 budget that's being put together under the twin specters of stalled growth and serious doubts around federal funding.

From friends in the Somerville Educators Union I've heard anger over meager Cost of Living Adjustments for veteran teachers -- one long-time SPS teacher told me they were set to receive a 0.12-percent COLA in an early proposal. And I've heard grave concerns about the district's funding for special education from families who rely on it.

I would love to see the superintendent asked to come up with a zero-based budget -- a "from scratch" budget that pretends previous budgets didn't exist -- that fully addresses the district's vital needs, as well as contingency add-ons that would enable SPS to take on things he really wanted to see us do as a district. And then depending on City's overall budget situation, the Administration could determine which -- if any -- of those add-ons we were able to take on in a given budget year.

But instead the School Committee and SPS administration are given a specified budget increase by the Administration and essentially told to make it work -- or instructed to "do more with less" as we heard this year. Our schools have been moving things stood up by ESSER funding over to the General Fund to ensure important work meeting students' academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs continues. But I would've been very curious to see where the Superintendent and School Committee would've spent additional funds if more were available.

In the end, the School Committee went along with the Mayor's proposed School budget with an increase of 5.2 percent. I do wonder how this would've gone had Somerville accepted Chapter 329 of the Acts of 1987 that would've given the City Council the power to accept budget recommendations from the School Committee and reallocate funding in those amounts to the School budget. This would've necessitated cuts elsewhere in the FY26 budget, provided of course the Administration and School Committee had worked together on a higher School budget. But absent that recourse, there's no mechanism to force that course of action.