My 2.5 cents on the proposed overrides

There’s a lot of good information out there about the proposed overrides (and plenty of misinformation as well) but I wanted to add my 2.5 (haha?) cents to the conversation now that the 1-page info sheet about school funding is out. (Disclaimer: I was among the volunteers who pulled this content together.) Brevity is not my modus operandi, but here’s as short and sweet as I could make it:

Question 7 - This one’s for anyone horrified by the cuts proposed in May 2023 and/or frustrated by the fact that it took a global pandemic to invest in so many essential supports for students, including mental health, physical safety, and technology. Stabilize the MPS budget so future budget discussions are about what we can do instead of what we can’t.

Question 8 - This one takes aim at the underlying issues and looks to the future. I asked last year’s MPS budget director-now-consultant (who, by the way, has done an amazing job cleaning up our accounting so we can finally understand where the money has gone and is going) to fact check my interpretation of the 80/20 salaries/expenses breakdown of the budget we received last May and he crunched the numbers to report back that between contracts, mandated services, and other Chapter 70 required spending, only 3% of our budget, or $2.6M, is “discretionary.” A yes vote on Question 8 raises that number ever so slightly and gives us a chance to tackle long standing “wish lists” without asking other City departments to sacrifice the things they need or depleting the “rainy day” funds that we desperately need to, among other things, make capital improvements to school buildings and equipment. If you don’t see specific numbers there, it’s not because there isn’t a plan; it’s because the people who will be at the negotiating table need assurance that we can pay for the proposals at hand. Question 8 lets us have the conversations.

From where I sit, as the parent of two MPS students, a homeowner, and a school committee member, this is long overdue. I hate that our society funds public education through property taxes and I really hate asking people for money. But if we as a community can’t rise to the challenge of an extra 47 cents per $1,000 of assessed value (that’s excluding Question 6), we’ll pay in other ways. Costs are not going down, and they’re certainly not going up at a rate of only 2.5%. 

Question 7 helps our schools survive. Question 8 helps them thrive. And comparisons with other districts only go so far. The central question for me is: Are we actually meeting our students’ needs? If your answer is yes, let’s do more. If your answer is no, let’s do better.