City of Worcester tells us ahead of time

In City Manager Batista's letter opening the FY26 city budget document, there's sentence I haven't seen in a city budget document before:

Despite the increases, the proposed FY26 education budget, built based on long-standing City and WPS practice of determining education contributions, may not achieve net school spending depending on the final State budget and final WPS expenditures.

 I am not sure how much credit to give for acknowledging it up front rather than letting us wait a few days to find out from the schools' budget.

As a reminder, net school spending is REQUIRED (in fact, I generally call it "required net school spending") by Massachusetts General Law chapter 70. It isn't optional; it isn't a nice thing to do; it is done by nearly every single city and town in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts every single dang year without a blink.

If your "long-standing...practice of determining education contributions" is (I'm going to be blunt here) breaking state law, your practice should be re-determined.

Insert levels of exhaustion here. 

UPDATE: which I said tonight at Council, about 12 minutes in.