Hi Friends:

Happy back to school! Summer is my favorite season, I like the long days, time outside, wearing shorts, less traffic…. I coached a lot of baseball, enjoyed family time at a Colorado dude ranch and on the Cape, and took a road trip to Cooperstown with Noah’s baseball gang.

When I was first elected I aspired to a monthly newsletter. The workload quickly made that unrealistic so I considered quarterly, but now here we are in September. I will keep working to get these to the top of my list.

Today I’ll share a brief rundown of my first eight months on the job. I’m proud of the work our new Committee has done and there’s a lot to say, so I’ll hit the high notes on top and then provide deeper dives below.

One note: Open Meeting Law limits what I can say about anything that is currently or soon to be under discussion, so most of these letters will be updates on things that already happened.

Away we go…

Headlines

So far this year, we:

• Found levers for the City to free up funds and give NPS a historic allocation increase, without raising taxes.

• Approved a new math curriculum that restores previous levels of rigor to match our peer school systems.

• Passed a new research-based homework policy to ensure all our students build learning habits as they move through NPS.

• Negotiated an agreement with the NTA to revamp the elementary school day to better serve our educational needs.

• Secured a commitment from the Mayor to use City funds to install and/or upgrade air conditioning at buildings that don’t have adequate a/c.

If that’s all the time you have, thanks for reading! Otherwise, read on for more details…

Committee Assignments

One of the first things the Committee did was figure out assignments. Chair Alicia Piedalue asked me to sit on the Bargaining Committee and the Finance Working Group, to be a designated liaison to our State House delegation and to the City’s Transportation team, and to be a worksteam lead on Technology and AI. That’s a lot but these are high-impact areas where I think my professional experiences can help.

With my role set, we got to work on a number of fronts. First priority was…

Finance

At the start of the year, Mayor Laredo asked me and Jason Bhardwaj, the other member of the School Committee’s Finance Team, to join a Finance Working Group that he was assembling to evaluate our approach to our pension obligations. The team was led by City CFO Maureen Lemieux and composed of City Councilors Becky Grossman and Martha Bixby, City COO Josh Morse, and a variety of city leaders and resident experts.

Over the course of January and February, the Finance Working Group met with a sequence of advisors and experts to consider options for our pension obligation. To distill a complicated topic down to its core:

• The City was paying down a huge pension obligation that had been underfunded by prior generations of Newtonians.

• The City was scheduled to complete the pay-down in August 2031.

• The City has a legal obligation to complete the pay-down by 2040.

• Like a mortgage, the faster we pay it down, the bigger the annual payments. If we pay it down slower, the annual payments get smaller, but we pay more interest over a longer period of time.

• There were two options for slowing it down - negotiating a deal with the city’s Retirement Board to extend the funding deadline, or bonding the pension - borrowing the money to pay it down today, and paying down that borrowed money over an extended period of time.

The Finance Working Group determined that the pension payments were growing too big to sustain - they were going to be choking the City’s budget. We ultimately recommended negotiating an extension with the Retirement Board and pursuing a Pension Obligation Bond, so we can stretch the payments out closer to 2040.

With that recommendation in hand, the Mayor negotiated an extension with the Retirement Board and is now working through a complex process to issue the bond.

The important result of this work is that significant money was freed up for the City budget over the next five years. That allowed the Mayor to give NPS the biggest funding increase in recent memory.

Budget

Last December, one departing School Committee member told me on the way out the door that we were looking at a $7m budget hole. “Good luck, I don’t know what you’re going to do,” was the parting advice. The Mayor’s decision to stretch out the pension payments and increase our allocation looked like it had plugged that hole.

But when our final budget modeling was in, the expense forecasts were higher than expected - due mostly to higher than expected inflation in health care and utilities costs - and we had a new hole. We negotiated with the Mayor and got him to increase the allocation again, but not enough to avoid cost cuts. So we were forced to pass a budget that included cuts to the administrative team, two high school positions, and a variety of other areas. The community was understandably upset, as was the Committee.

We are faced with a harsh reality, that in an environment where major expenses like health care are growing at over 10% per year, there’s no good way to balance a budget where revenues grow at 4%, 5%, or even the 5.75% we were given this year.

We have already had three meetings with the Mayor about next year’s budget. We’re all committed to working hard to find solutions that avoid continuing to be forced into cuts.

We drafted and debated a policy that really aimed to do two things. First, we wanted to create more parity across the schools, so when students step up from elementary to middle or middle to high school, they are coming from similar places. Second, we wanted to ensure some appropriate step-laddering of homework - you get a little more each year so there’s never a huge jump that overwhelms a cohort of students.

In June we approved a new policy. It’s not perfect but it’s a start in this direction and we’re committed to hearing experiential feedback from the community. The intention is to revisit it next school year for adjustments.

Photo Break!

It’s been a busy gig and I’m never good about taking pictures, but here’s a glimpse of some of the fun…

Elementary School Day

Our school administration team saw opportunities to improve our elementary school day - to give students a better experience, give teachers’ more time to prepare lessons, and allow us to allocate our limited budget more efficiently. These adjustments required negotiating changes to our collective bargaining agreement with the NTA. This was the first time our new Bargaining Committee (Alicia Piedalue, Jason Bhardwaj and yours truly) went into a meaty contract negotiation with the NTA. We worked collaboratively to come to an agreement that the administration is happy with and the NTA ratified handily. We’re excited for the changes we made and the impact they will have on our elementary school students and educators.

This has been a problem for years, but we’re grateful that the Laredo Administration is committed to solving it without impacting the NPS budget. They identified electrical work that was needed and scoped potential solutions. They will be installing new air conditioning at 11 buildings, starting this fall. The units will be energy efficient and quiet. They will have smart plugs so they can be turned off remotely and they won’t be wasting energy when school isn’t in session.