If you are involved at all in school finances, read about Randolph

 WGBH has a good piece from earlier this week about the town finally paying vendors' bills school side for the first time in a few months: 

School officials — including Superintendent Thea Stovell Herndon and School Committee Chair Lisa Millwood — say the town created a financial crisis by not signing the necessary paperwork. There was no deficit, they said. Instead, the money was in other school accounts, such as grant funds, that simply needed to be transferred to a spending account to cover the bills.

That step, they said, required the assistance of the town finance department.

Millwood described an onerous, bureaucratic process to the town council in June. She said for each transfer, the town finance department was requiring a blizzard of paperwork, organized in a very particular way. “And then it gets rejected, gets sent back and then we fix it again, then it goes back to the town, then it gets rejected and comes back. So what honestly should take us hours to complete is taking us weeks,” she said.

As a result, Millwood said, the town just stopped paying the bills at the end of May.

And further along: 

Records of problems go back years. In June 2023, officials from a consulting firm called TMSolution that had briefly been serving as the schools’ finance manager announced they were leaving the position because “we’ve concluded that we currently are not a good fit for each other.” The resignation letter did not offer details, other than to say “the systems we inherited have presented unforeseen challenges.” Nobody from the company, based in Auburn, responded to requests for comment.

When Annya Washburn stepped into the role in 2024, she says the experience was no better for her. She found a system that used online payments for school lunch charges, but not for anything else. So when the schools adopted a $50 technology fee for laptops issued to students, parents had to pay with cash, bank checks or money orders.

As a result, Washburn said last summer the schools ended up with more than $70,000 in cash and no secure place to put it. She said her supervisors told her not to hand the money over to the town, in part because of concerns the schools would never get the money back. So she opened a bank account and put it there.

But despite being the school finance director, she did not have legal authority to open a bank account.

In a public Town Council meeting in March, Councillor James Burgess Jr. said she had opened the account “in her own name.” While Washburn designated a colleague and herself as signatories on the account, it was opened in the name of the Town of Randolph.

And then recently:

At one point, Council President Chris Alexopoulos had to pound his gavel to stop the bickering among councillors.

The divided council agreed to return for another emergency meeting four days later — Friday, July 18.

At that meeting, Councillor Natacha Clerger announced that after the Monday night gavel-banging, a few councillors convened a side conversation with town and city officials. “In five minutes, we did get everything solved,” she said. 

Solved through a side conversation raises, of course, other questions.

In any case... 

The damage we're doing to kids due to ICE

 Three pieces of note on this: 

• Carrie Jung at WBUR spoke specifically with Massachusetts school districts about the damage that real and rumored ICE activity is having on children's access to education: 
  

  It's been an extra responsibility to provide emotional support to students and families impacted. A number of district heads in Massachusetts reported periodic dips in attendance as rumors of ICE activity swirled. 

  Noted there is both that chronic absenteeism is part of school district accountability and that students not enrolling drops a district's foundation budget, which can drop their state funding.
  
  

• The Boston Globe Magazine took an in-depth look at the children left behind after their parents are taken by ICE. 
  

  Children in these situations can be prone to anxiety and depression, says Charles A. Nelson III, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.
  Having an attachment figure suddenly vanish can be “really devastating to kids,” Nelson says, in part because they thrive on predictability and constancy. “When we say ‘taken away,’ there’s this mysterious black box that exists on the other side.”
  In interviews over the last several months, families across Massachusetts recounted how the lives of their children have been upended by these arrests. 

• In some cases across the country, ICE has taken students themselves. USA Today has some of their stories. 
  

  Martir is one of at least five children and teens who have been rounded up by ICE and deported from the United States with their parents since the start of Trump's second presidential term. Many won't return to their schools in the fall.

  "Martir’s absence rippled beyond the school walls, touching the hearts of neighbors and strangers alike, who united in a shared hope for his safe return," Sara Myers, a spokesperson for the Torrance Unified School District, told USA TODAY.

Sometimes the Friday news drop is good

 I was away last week, so this is coming Monday morning, when you have no doubt already heard: the federal grants that should have come through for the start of the fiscal year on July 1 are being released today. Below is the email that went out on Friday at 2:41 PM: 

"it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it."

 On Monday, the Supreme Court on a 6-3 vote allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with the massive Department of Education layoffs while the cases challenging those layoffs proceed. Because it was taken on the "shadow docket," emergency orders that are issued unsigned and without the decision having an argument in support. Chris Geidner notes the hypocrisy of the Roberts court in making this call. 

As Quinta Jurecic writes in The Atlantic:

This silence is damaging, both to the legitimacy of the Court and to the rule of law. The judiciary is a branch of government that is meant to provide reasons for its actions—to explain, both to litigants and to the public, why judges have done what they have done. This is part of what distinguishes law from the raw exercise of power, and what anchors the courts as a component of a democratic system rather than setting them apart as unaccountable sages. With a written opinion, people can evaluate the justices’ reasoning for themselves. Without it, they are left to puzzle over the Court’s thinking like ancients struggling to decipher the wrath of gods in the scattering of entrails.

What we were not left in any doubt of was the opinion of the minority, written by Justice Sotomayor, a quote from which is the title of this blog post. Sotormayor reviews the history of the federal government's involvement in public education; the important role the Department of Education plays in education; in addition to reviewing the case. She summarizes the argument before them as: 

Before this Court, the Government does not defend the lawfulness of its actions.  Rather, in a now-familiar move, it presents a grab bag of jurisdictional and remedial arguments to support its bid for emergency relief.  None justifies this Court’s intervention. 

She closes by: 

The President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them. That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers.  Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief.  Because I cannot condone such abuse of our equitable authority, I respectfully dissent. 

 It is worth noting that this is a stay to an injunction that stopped the layoffs (again) while the cases proceed. The point of the injunction, of course, was layoffs were in fact destroying the Department even as it wasn't being destroyed by an official process. 

As I've said from the beginning (of the prior Trump administration!), the concern here is not only for money, though that tends to capture the headlines. It is also about the services that are provided by the federal department, of which I would highlight the protection of civil rights. We may well be about to find out what happens when every state is left to determine for itself what it is willing to do if not required to.

On the state FY26 budget

This is of course and as always coming from me who posts on here as me  

First off, cheers to the Boston Globe (yes, you did read that right!*) for this piece which interviews a lot of the right people, who point to many of the important things on this state budget and education! Huzzah! 

The Department of Revenue did issue FINAL (because the budget is signed) cherry sheets for FY26 at the end of last week, and DESE has similarly issued FINAL chapter 70 and net school spending information. Remember, the only way that any of this is changing at this point is if the Legislature decides to overrule vetoes. If you hear anything on that one, let me know.

Let's turn then to the budget we just got. 

Massachusetts isn't fully funding charter school tuition reimbursement

 For reasons that are unclear to me, this doesn't seem to be getting any attention, but Massachusetts isn't fully funding charter school tuition reimbursement. 

As of the May 6 projections, charter school tuition reimbursement statewide should have been (per DESE's numbers) $215,792,970. The conference committee instead agreed to $199M. It wasn't fully funded.

And that was before the Governor vetoed another $19.9M over the weekend: 

The Governor isn't wrong that the account fluctuates over the year; charter enrollment does, so the amount needed does. 
What this misses is that midyear money isn't the same as July money. It also misses--again, something the state seems rather stuck on--that midyear funding doesn't, save in cases where the funding is allocated "without further appropriation" to the school district itself, get to municipal school districts. It goes into the municipal general fund. 

The Legislature could override the veto, though State House News reports:

House Speaker Ronald Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka both provided thankful quotes for Healey's budget action press release, each of them referencing a shared commitment to "responsible" budget management.

Fully funding charter school reimbursement is part of the Student Opportunity Act. It thus is not the case that the commitment of the SOA is being met.  

Is their bad generative AI news?

 All, there is ALWAYS more bad generative AI news!

• Last week, 67 companies signed a "Pledge to America's Youth: Investing in AI education" with the Trump White House. If you think "Google, IBM, MagicSchool, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Varsity Tutors" and like are in this for the good of children and their education, I have an almost $900 billion annual budget to sell you.
  These are not people you want coming up with ethics or rules of play or code of transparency around any of this. In fact, these are the same people and companies who wanted to ban regulation for ten years (luckily they lost).
  Let's be super clear, that these companies are in it because they all have dollar signs in their eyes. 

So about that impounded federal funding

 The Office of Management and Budget, to which the Department of Education is directing all inquiries, were asked about the freeze on current year federal grant funds and they have quite an answer:

“Initial findings show that many of these grants programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda,” the spokesman said in statement to RealClearPolitics.

Asked for specifics, OMB officials said it had found an example in New York in which public schools had used funds designated for English-language learning to promote “illegal immigrant advocacy organizations.” The agency, which oversees federal spending, also said funds had used the grants to steer illegal immigrants towards “scholarships intended for American students.” In an unspecified case, the school improvement funds were allegedly used for a seminar on “queer resistance in the arts.”

The AP also has picked this up. 

Happy Fourth! Read Adams!

I realize we live in a time in which we cannot take for granted that elected representatives have read the Declaration of Independence, but I cannot help but feel we’d be better off if more people were familiar with John Adams’ Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law. 

It’s dense! It’s written in the style of the educated man of the times! It is not a light read!

But in terms of the dangers of oligarchy, of Christian nationalism, of lack of education leading to lacks of liberty, he has it.

It’s from 1765, so consider that.

 I wear my nerd hat proudly on this one.

The Commissioner on the federal grants (and two notes from me)

The (new) Commissioner of Education sent out an update on federal grants to districts today, which I am quoting here in full (followed by two notes from me):

Bits and pieces

 

please enjoy these NH ladyslippers

Some things I've been reading that I'd recommend:

More to read on the Mahmoud decision

•  I've subscribed to Chris Geidner at Law Dork, and I highly recommend him in general. Here's what he has on the Mahmoud decision. He starts by noting the inconsistency when it comes to the rights of parents:
  
  

  If the justices so concerned about parental rights on Friday meant that, they would have, one would think, taken a question relating to a similar issue — or, at least, sent it back to the Sixth Circuit to be reconsidered in light of Skrmetti and Mahmoud. 

  But that is not the message the court wanted to send on Monday. In four other cases relating to trans people’s lives, the court did send the cases back to be reconsidered in light of Skrmetti. All of those cases were cases in which the plaintiffs challenging anti-trans policies won in the appeals court, so it was the government defending those policies and asking the Supreme Court to take up the cases. 

  In all four cases — two involving Medicaid exclusions for gender-affirming medical care, one involving public teachers health insurance plans, and one involving birth certificate policies — the Supreme Court granted certiorari, vacated the appeals court decision below, and remanded “for further consideration in light of” Skrmetti. In other words, the Fourth Circuit, Ninth Circuit, and Tenth Circuit are to re-examine these cases given Skrmetti. 

  But, in the two cases where the states defending their anti-trans policies won below, the court let those stand — even though the plaintiffs had raised a question unresolved by Skrmetti.

  
  
  
• Elie Mystal writing in The Nation nails what the overwhelming theme is of Alito's majority decision. 
  

  The astute reader will note that I haven’t talked about the law in this case, but that’s because Alito doesn’t really talk about the law either. Alito offers no coherent reasoning for why these books violate the First Amendment rights of the bigoted parents, while others do not. His argument requires you to accept the premise that being gay or trans is facially immoral, and the objection of religious parents is obvious. If you do not accept those anachronistic premises, what logic there is in his opinion completely falls apart. Under Alito’s logic, any parent of any religion can object to any book for any reason.

Happy fiscal new year! Trump has impounded billions in federal grants for this year

Happy fiscal new year! FY26 officially begins today for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for Mass school districts, and for our towns and cities!

This also means we have lots of people starting new positions today: new superintendent contracts generally begin July 1, and our new Massachusetts Commissioner of Education Pedro Martinez is starting today, as well. 

But it wouldn't be the Trump administration if we weren't also starting the new year with bad news, and so it is today: that concern I noted last week over federal grants for the fiscal year we start today has come to pass, and it is even worse than forecast.