Boston School Committee: 2·12·26 Meeting Recap

Last night, the district had a two-part meeting, beginning with a Budget Hearing for FY 2027 and then a short School Committee meeting. The budget hearing largely touched on many of the same financial themes we have heard from the district before, including transportation costs and collective bargaining expenses, while also highlighting some more granular fiscal challenges at the school level. School Committee members asked a number of questions about multilingual programming, cuts to personnel, and the connection between the FY 27 budget and the long-term facilities plan.  After a brief public comment period, the meeting moved on to a discussion of a new collective bargaining agreement between School Bus Monitors and the district. Notably, this new agreement requires BPS to ask Boston City Council for an extra $1 million this fiscal year to fund the contract. We will keep tabs on how the City Council reacts to this request as well as similar asks in the future.  Here at the Shah Foundation, we wanted to provide readers with an in-depth look at some of the budget issues for FY 2027. Our team has put together the below analysis, with further commentary and statistics at the link on the bottom of the page. Budget and Staffing:  Boston Public Schools proposed a $1.71B budget for FY2027, a 4.5% increase over the current budget, and greater than 8% increase from the $1.58B budget initially passed for FY2026. The total employee headcount for BPS will drop to 10,496, down 5% or 531 positions from FY2026. Total enrollment for the 2026 school year is just 44,416  (46,547 including in-district charters), down more than 1,600 students from 2025 – the lowest enrollment on record. This 8.3% budget increase over last year’s adopted budget is the second largest increase since FY2019. Since that year, the budget has increased by 54%, and total staffing is more than 12% higher. Over the same period, enrollment dropped by 14%, and the total number of BPS schools receiving funding has decreased to 106, down from 124. To read more interesting analysis about next year’s budget, click here.  What’s Next:  We are in the midst of the budget process - the next budget hearing will be held on March 4th! Stay tuned for more coverage. Be well!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices