School may be out for the summer, but the Massachusetts state legislature has been busy finalizing the state budget for the fiscal year 2025-26 (approved on June 30) with significant increases in education spending.
The $60.9 billion budget was signed by Governor Maura Healey on July 4. According to a mass.gov press release, the Governor also filed a $100 million supplemental budget to help the Healey administration respond to changes in federal spending and economic uncertainty. The supplemental budget also gives the Governor “expanded emergency budget-cutting authority and budget line-item transferability.”
The state’s fiscal year 2025-26 state budget commits $180 million to fully fund free school meals for Massachusetts’ public school students, $103.8 million to offset costs related to “yellow bus” transportation for students enrolled in regional and vocational school districts, $15 million in continued support of the Department of Education’s Literacy Launch Initiative, and $182 million in additional funds over FY25 for the state’s special education circuit breaker fund, a program which partially reimburses eligible costs incurred by school districts for tuition and transportation of students with disabilities enrolled in specialized educational programs outside of their home districts.
The state budget also includes an historic increase in “minimum aid” funding which rose from $104 per pupil in an earlier iteration of the state budget to $150 per pupil. The increase will provide additional fiscal relief to two-hundred forty-five Massachusetts school districts with declining enrollment.
The Acton-Boxborough School Committee, which actively advocated for increased funding from the state throughout the spring and anticipated the minimum aid increase, voted at their June 12 business meeting to use $150K of the additional minimum aid funding to reduce Acton’s assessment by $123,835 (from $79,959,269 to $79,835,434) and Boxborough’s assessment by $26,165 (from $16,824,370 to $16,798,205).
The Committee approved the District’s recommendation to use the remainder of the revenue increase to hire new staff positions in areas of critical need and restore elementary classroom and reading assistant positions that were not funded in the budget adopted by Acton and Boxborough Town Meetings in May. This action raised the overall 2025-26 budget for the School District from $116,791,164 to $117,029,054 and required a formal budget amendment, which was passed by a two-thirds vote of the School Committee.
Also on June 12, the School Committee approved a recommendation by Finance Director Sheri Matthews to direct $2.1 million from the District’s general reserve account, known as the Excess and Deficiency Fund, to the District’s capital stabilization revolving account which restricts use of funds to costly and urgent building upgrades and capital projects. The Committee also approved the creation of a health insurance stabilization account to help defray future expenses related to employees who opt into the District’s health benefits plan during the school year. The health insurance stabilization account will be funded with a $620K reimbursement to the District by the Acton Health Insurance Trust from savings on runout claims.
The Committee also approved the sale of a $3.53 million general obligation ten-year bond for the Boardwalk Campus project. Chair Klein commented, “When we originally bonded the project, the Bond Subcommittee got an extremely favorable rate, saving the communities roughly $30 million in interest payments by bonding the majority of the school building early on. This is the last of that borrowing.”
The School Committee’s next meeting is scheduled for August 26.
Diane Baum is the School Committee beat reporter for the Acton Exchange. She served on the Acton-Boxborough Regional School Committee from 2015 to 2021.