On the Senate's Ways and Means budget

In the Senate Ways and Means budget released Tuesday, most of the education lines are parallel to the House budget, with these exceptions: 

The circuit breaker is still down from the Governor, so the open question here is what they're doing with the supplemental, which does have supplemental circuit breaker funding in it.
Related to this line, incidentally, is that there is word out there that the Legislature doesn't plan to take action on the supplemental budget until taking action on the FY26 budget, despite some of the funding in the supplemental budget for circuit breaker being for FY25. That's WAY too late. If the intent is for it to be for FY25, it needs to get to districts this fiscal year, which it will not if they wait until conference committee.

The Senate puts rural schools back to $16M.


The charter school reimbursement is down $14M from the House Ways and Means budget, with no clear reason as to why*. I've taken a look at some of the bigger districts on the updated preliminary cherry sheets and district by district loss in charter school reimbursement compared to the House Ways and Means budget:

•  $2M Worcester
• $3.5M Springfield
• $1.75M Lowell
• $500K New Bedford
• $1.5M Lawrence
• $1M Fall River
• $1.5M Brockton
• $389K Barnstable
• $478K Chelsea
• $657K Everett
  
  

UPDATE: Having taken a look at the updated DESE numbers, the Senate just doesn't fully fund charter reimbursement. The account should be $215,792,970; it's $183,828,858. It's funded at 85.2% of what it should be.

I hear a lot of people talk about "deals" and "commitment" this time of year. This is not either.

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*Boston's charter reimbursement is up by about $4M, but tuition is also up by $10M, which I assume is the approvals from the Board of Ed meeting earlier this spring coming through.