In a statement read at the Nov. 14 School Committee meeting, Chair Abby Besse called the town administration’s accusation that the committee is misusing Devens revenue and the district owes the town money for teacher benefits “blatantly false and pernicious.”
On Sept. 27, town administration released the Devens revenue report, created with the help of the Finance Department. The report described what Town Administrator Tim Bragan called an “eye-opening” discovery: The schools don’t use the line items in the state’s breakdown of Harvard’s per-pupil costs to dictate how they spend the revenue received for each student living in Devens. The report called out teacher benefits as an example, and it estimated that if the per-pupil cost for benefits were being reimbursed to the town for each Devens student, the total would amount to about $300,000 a year.
But the School Committee says the calculations that go into the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s per-pupil cost have nothing to do with how the money is to be spent. The contract between MassDevelopment and the School Committee only specifies that the DESE cost per Harvard pupil should be used to determine how much money Harvard Public Schools will receive yearly for each Devens student.
Besse said Devens tuition is used to benefit all Harvard students. Among other things, the money offsets teacher salaries and technology and capital expenditures. She said the report seemed like “an attempt by the town to discredit and spread doubt throughout our community that the School Committee is not working appropriately with the money that has been allocated for the education of HPS students.” In the committee’s written response to the report, it used enrollment figures to show that the 97 Devens students attending Harvard schools this year are spread across pre-K to grade 12, and there are no specific “Devens teachers” that are costing the town additional benefits.
Besse told the committee she met with the town and school administrators, the finance director, and the chairs of the Finance Committee and the Select Board on Nov. 7 to discuss the report, and to let attendees know the School Committee had identified inaccuracies in some of the figures. “It was an extremely difficult meeting with very little progress,” Besse said. The outcome of the meeting was an email from Select Board Chair Rich Maiore summarizing the discussion of three options for the School Committee.
No good options
The first option was for the committee to reimburse the town $270,000 for this fiscal year’s benefits portion of Devens student revenue based on DESE calculations. Going forward, the schools would be expected to pay the DESE percentage of benefits out of Devens money each year. The second option was to create a policy to limit the School Committee’s use of Devens revenue to “items specific to educating Devens kids.” Option three was for the School Committee to simply acknowledge that taxpayers are funding teacher benefits for Devens students.
Members did not react well to any of those options. Sharlene Cronin said they were “demeaning.” Suzie Allen said she took issue not only with the options, but also that the report was created without the committee’s involvement. “There’s a complete misperception of the way that this funding is to be implemented and has always been implemented,” Allen said.
SusanMary Redinger said if the town needs to cut the school budget, it should just do it without accusing the School Committee of misusing funds and not being transparent. “The chair of the Select Board said that we should be collaborative,” she said. “This is not the way to do it.” She added that there is the possibility that the Finance Committee could use the report’s findings to justify taking $270,000 away from the fiscal 2024 school budget.
Every School Committee member in the meeting rejected all three options. Besse conveyed that information to the Select Board during public comment at its meeting the following night. She told the board the town was making the mistake of confusing DESE’s per-pupil expenditure line items as a directive on how Devens revenue should be spent.
Former Select Board member Stu Sklar also spoke during public comment and said the report shouldn’t even exist. He said he was on the School Committee in the early days of the Devens contract, and he knew exactly why the DESE calculation was used in the contract. “I’m the guy that put that number in there. That number wasn’t for the town,” he said. “It was a fair way to negotiate. A number that would change over time, calculated by a third party, the Department of Education in this case. That’s why it exists.”
Sklar said he was also “deeply concerned” that the School Committee was given three options to act on before the Devens revenue report had been discussed by the Select Board. Member Kara Minar also told Maiore that she thought the board had the right to know that the School Committee was being presented with those options. Maiore said he was simply capturing the outcome of the Nov. 7 meeting. He said he was scheduled to meet with the finance director and the chair of the Finance Committee the next day to review possible inaccuracies in the report and options for the next step. He plans to bring those options back to the board at its next meeting, scheduled for Dec. 6.
