Next Steps for Improving Fiscal Sustainability in the Regional School District
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Report on the Meeting of the Four Towns, November 8, 2025
This meeting was held in the library of the Amherst Regional Middle School, and was not simulcast or recorded.
Present
Members from the Amherst Town Council, Amherst Finance Committee, Leverett Town Council, Leverett Finance Committee, Pelham Town Council, Pelham Finance Committee, Shutesbury Town Council and Shutesbury Finance Committee
Regional School Committee: Sarahbess Kenney (Chair, Pelham), Anna Heard (Shutesbury), Bridget Hynes (Amherst), Deb Leonard (Amherst), Sarah Marshall (Amherst), Jennifer Shiao (Amherst), Tim Shores (Leverett)
RSC Fiscal Sustainability Subcommittee: Deb Leonard (Chair), Anna Heard, TIm Shores and Bridget Hynes
Staff: E. Xiomara Herman (Dr. Xi, Superintendent of Schools), Shannon Bernacchia (Director of Finance, Amherst Public Schools)
Cathy Schoen (Amherst Town Council, District 1) and Ajay Khashu, (Shutsbury Finance Committee) presented the Four Towns Fiscal Outlook slideshow, and represented the informal Four Towns Working Group.
In an attempt to end the previous rigid structure of Four Town Meetings, the library tables and chairs were reorganized into a horseshoe shape to better facilitate conversation.
The meeting was dedicated to tackling financial sustainability in the schools, how the towns and state contribute funding, and how to improve spending for the future, including addressing additional factors like the Chapter 70 formula in rural school districts, the increased number of students with special needs, and decreased enrollment in the region overall.
Both the Regional School Committee’s Fiscal Sustainability Subcommittee and the Four Towns Working Group presented data and findings to contribute to the discussion.
“I think the conversation that is being had today as a foundational conversation is one that will help us as a school system to rebuild programming and attract individuals, and keep and retain our students within the region,” Dr E. Xiomara Herman (Dr. Xi) said.
Fiscal Sustainability Subcommittee Finding
The subcommittee, originally founded in spring 2024, has spent about a year and a half searching for “long-term sustainable paths to improve the district’s budget,” as explained in part of their presentation in the Four Towns Meeting.
Much of this work has involved working with other school districts in Western Massachusetts, advocacy at the state-level, and data collection as demonstrated in their report from this September. The report notes that most school districts in the region have needed to increase their budgets by 6 to 13% for FY26, while ARPS limited the increase to 4.7%. The report stressed that, although enrollment in the regional schools has decreased by 40% over the past 20 years, many costs remain fixed, such as retiree health and pension costs, and building maintenance. Also, the percentage of students with disabilities has increased from 20 to 25% over the past five years, which increases the funding needed for mandated services.
Some of the biggest impacts to funding regional public education comes down to state funding through the Chapter 70 formula for rural school districts and the threat posed by competition from charter schools.
Tim Shores summarized the points brought up doing the meeting, and explained, that because Chapter 70 state aid under the Student Opportunity Act is based on property values, income, and growth so that poorer towns contribute less and wealthier towns more, ARPS towns fund a larger share of the regional school budget than before. Also, the region falls just below the threshold for higher state aid under the 2022 revised formula for low income student populations. Shores added, “The costs of simply educating children are not fixed. Charters are notorious for what’s called ‘skimming.’ They take the highest achievers and the students who do not need special services, and so they end up taking students who cost the least to educate, which leaves behind the greater proportion of the students who cost the most to educate.”
Amherst Town Councilor Mandi Jo Hanneke (at-large) shared that for the fiscal year of 2025 there were 30 students from the four towns enrolled in the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts (PVPA) Charter School, and this year that number climbed to 40 students. She noted, “PVPA had been holding steady for three or four years at that 30ish range, so it’s only a one year trend at this point, but there is a jump.”
When addressing all the programs and additional services cut from the district to conserve costs, Hanneke questioned whether items were defunded due to lack of interest or to save money. Either way, Dr. Xi explained the lack of these options motivates students to apply to charter schools.“As we reduce programming, they are offering what our students could have been taking,” she said.
Sarah Marshall added, “If the loss of [a] program is causing more students to disenroll and go to charter school, it’s worsening our problem because it is going to drive even more money (away). So, it is destabilizing.”
Dr. Xi also pointed out that students in special education will leave to go to charter schools, and quickly learn that those schools cannot properly address their needs. And after the pandemic, there are more students in need of additional support. “As a public school system, we are legally mandated, and more so, we should be morally mandated to provide students with what they need. The students that are retained now, whether they are in special education or not, we have to provide a level of intervention for our students to be able to be successful,” Dr. Xi said.
Next Steps
In the end, the subcommittee called for a community-wide effort to improve state funding and a group effort from the towns and the Regional School Committee going forward. “We are not just demanding more money to serve students, we are trying to make adjustments as our population decreases. We are not just continuing to try to provide the same teachers and same services to a smaller shrinking population,” Anna Heard said.
Four Towns Working Group
For a broader picture, the towns presented data and information about the factors influencing town spending. While supportive of collaborating with the Regional School Committee, the towns highlighted ways their budgets are affected by lack of commercial tax income, limited property tax income based on the 2 ½ cap, and decreasing state funding.
The towns proposed shared data collection to improve understanding around funding and where each of the towns in the school district are coming from. The next step will be organizing a formal group with liaisons from the Regional School Committee and town councils to discuss the future financial sustainability.
The meeting adjourned with the plan to discuss the findings with their respective groups and communicate with Sarahbess Kenney to coordinate a formal, public meeting.
Read More
Amherst Regional Budget Fears Prompt Early Four Towns Meeting (Daily Hampshire Gazette)
I am interested in knowing how much is spent per student in the regional and Amherst school districts compared to nearby towns. I think it’s quite a bit more. And of course the questions are why and can this be changed even as we improve the education we give to our children? This higher spending is sustained by very high Amherst property taxes which are a burden to many and keep families and younger people from moving here. Higher spending per pupil in Amherst also means we send more money per pupil out to charter schools-another financial hit.
In response to Janet’s question, I just want to say that school finance experts actually caution against comparing per pupil costs across districts – there are just too many variables and differences in accounting practices to make these comparisons apples to apples. Hadley, for example, has a lower per-pupil cost than the Amherst schools, but the percentage of students with disabilities in their schools is lower than in ours, and they don’t run as many specialized programs as we do. I think we can all agree that we want to support and meet legal and moral obligations to students with disabilities – but this does come at a cost. It is tempting to compare us to Northampton, but not only have they not lost student population as fast as Amherst, they have many shared services with the city that we don’t have in Amherst for some reason (this is something we should be asking about).
The Northampton Schools and City share an IT Department, Facilities Department, HR Department, etc…And while the Northampton Schools do have a similar percentage of students with disabilities, they were recently dinged by DESE for not filling their legal obligation to these students. I was at the DESE/DLS Listening Session on the Chapter 70 (state eduation funding) Formula in Greenfield last week and many districts in Western Mass cited per-pupil spending even higher than in Amherst. This is largely because it is very difficult for districts that are Regional, partially or fully rural, and have a declining enrollment to achieve economies of scale the way that more urban/suburban districts that have not lost as much population can.
The Fiscal Sustainability Subcommittee of the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee recently released a report that is very informative in breaking down some of this. Among their data they cite that in FY26, $10 million of the Regional School budget will go to cover four fixed costs (retiree health insurance, employee health insurance, pension assessments, and charter school sending tuition). When you average the retiree costs from when we used to employ a much larger staff over the current smaller student population, the cost per pupil rises.
So much has already been done to try to reduce costs in our schools, and that work is ongoing. I think most everyone would agree that it is not ideal that education costs as much as it does AND that the state doesn’t pay nearly its fair share, but unfortunately, these costs are real and difficult to reduce without impacting quality of education. Quality has already gone down significantly over the years. ARHS used to be one of the top high schools in the state and it is now middle of the pack. There is so much good information on all of these issues in the School Committee’s Fiscal Sustainability Report (https://go.boarddocs.com/ma/arps/Board.nsf/files/DN4QXF6B2A59/$file/FSS%20Report%20110425.pdf) and also lots of context and background on the SOS Amherst website (www.arpsparents.com). And for anyone wishing to take action to tell the state to better fund our schools, here is information on an ongoing effort right now: https://www.arpsparents.com/state-advocacy-alert-nov-18/
In answer to my question, it’s a lot. The state website: https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/ppx.aspx
The mathematical fact illustrated by CM’s salient remark above
When you average the retiree costs from when we used to employ a much larger staff over the current smaller student population, the cost per pupil rises.
has two important corollaries:
i) attract more students to our public schools by improving our programs: this requires greater investment from not only all four towns in our region, but also the from well-endowed stakeholders in our community;
ii) stem the flow of resources — and students — from our public schools to other schools as a result of inequitably funding formulas: this will require cooperation of, and serious negotiation with, these other schools and with the Massachussets legislature.
As astutely observed by District 1 Council candidate Vince O’Connor, it’s not merely broad demographic trends, but also particularly poor decisions — like rejecting a well-conceived, community-led Chinese language immersion program within our own public schools — that have led to our diminished public school student population.
While that may be “water over the proverbial dam,” our public schools and the other area schools must work together to ensure that “water” helps all our kids thrive.