Two quick notes on Massachusetts school funding

First, both from this piece quoting Senate President Spilka and elsewhere, it seems as though we're going to get through FY20 unscathed in terms of local aid and Chapter 70. That would mean that there seems to be a general sense we can get through to the end of June without what are known as 9C cuts, at least to those accounts.
Not so much for FY21, which begins in July, however.

On the CARES Act, the state's application for K-12 funding was approved Monday; district applications should be available by the end of the week or early next week. The rough calculation on this is expect 80% of whatever the FY20 allocation for your district for Title I in FY20 (Worcester folks, that's 80% of $11.7M=$9.36M). These funds can be used for about anything you'd be able to spend money on under a Title program, and they can be used through September 2022.

There are two HOWEVERs on this, though:

• Title I is expected to be down statewide, both because federal aid mostly isn't going up and because our statewide census for Title I is down (and I don't entirely understand that part myself, so I have asked about it). How much is going to depend on your district, but if the overall state number is down, that's...a problem. (Worcester, the local estimate is down 10%. You will note that the CARES funding is less than that.)
• PLUS, it has been observed that under ARRA (remember that federal aid in the Obama administration during the economic downturn?), the Legislature backfilled Chapter 70 aid with the federal aid. In other words, your Chapter 70 aid got cut, and they filled the cut with the federal aid. We do not yet know if this is what will happen, but it is a thing that has happened before.

In other words: CARES Act is NOT "go have some fun" money.