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. 

I really appreciate that Sam Drysdale over at State House News flagged that this budget (that's a New Bedford Light link )uses Fair Share funding--that's "the millionaires' tax"--to cover the chapter 70 increase. Fair Share is supposed to cover new initiatives, and it's...a stretch? to say this is one: 

In past budgets, similar increases to Chapter 70 were paid for through general state revenues. The shift this year raised red flags for those who view the surtax as a way to go above and beyond standard funding obligations. 

“Voters overwhelmingly approved the Fair Share Amendment to enable new investments in public education and transportation — not to plug existing budget gaps,” said Bahar Akman Imboden, director of the Hildreth Institute, a research center focused on equity in higher education. She said she was “disappointed” to see nearly $500 million “being used to backfill” K-12 spending.

Remember, we the Commonwealth, committed to the Student Opportunity Act BEFORE we passed the Fair Share amendment! We'd planned to cover it through existing infrastructure. 

Now it is illegal? No. But is it something that needs to be recognized as a choice made? Yes.

Incidentally, I have the same concern with covering free lunch this way. 

However, let's grant that Colin Jones (as per, basically, always), flags an important point:

“There are more new things you could do if you weren’t using so much of it for Chapter 70, so it’s hard to see in isolation. It’s complicated,” said Colin Jones, deputy policy director at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. “But this year when we hear talk about things like the impact of the trade war, tariffs, the economy and the federal budget, they’re building flexibility with this maneuver to increase Fair Share to cover basically all of the Chapter 70 increase this year,” he said. “That frees up general funds to do other stuff. And flexibility in this environment is pretty good.”

Remember, this budget also leaves $800M unallocated, and we're seeing reasons every day why that's a good idea.

 An important note is that part of what is it covering is not what we probably think of as SOA funding at all: it's the $346 million in hold harmless funding and a total of $79.5M in per pupil minimum increases. The first part of that, as I have noted, always gets skimmed over, and both halves this--a total of over $425 million!--have nothing to do with the state funding system that otherwise is grounded in ensuring high need students have more support, and that high need communities have state support to do it. 

It may not be surprising that Boston is getting the largest amount of hold harmless aid at $23 million, but we should remember that Boston Public Schools would have been getting foundation aid increases if we'd have real inflation recognized during the years it was capped at 4.5% (nicely noted by AFT-MA President Jessica Tang in the above Globe article as an issue).
But the districts that are getting more than $5 million aren't necessarily ones you might guess: 

This is from my calculations using the "comparisons to FY25" tab
on the DESE FY26 spreadsheet released last week. My version of that is here.

I post that not to critique any district--this is, after all, happening statewide--but to note that there is a lot of money here that isn't being discussed when we talk about state aid for schools, while those dollars are very much part of local districts' understanding of their state aid, none of which are coming from our agreed-upon calculations of need, at a time when we haven’t even fully phased in the funding we have agreed is needed for that need. And some of these are even districts that have been quite outspoken about how the funding system isn't working for them, because they're seeing solely the $150/pupil increase this year. That's while districts, because every district is required to spend their foundation budget PLUS all state aid they get through chapter 70, have required spending levels of well over 100% of foundation, something that many of the districts that are recognized as having the highest amounts of need can only dream of.
The above list, by the way, wouldn't be the ones with the highest percentages over foundation, due to the relative size of their budgets. 
And, yes, I'm going to keep hammering this point, because something that made it into this budget is a chapter 70 study commission at DESE**, and if we don't have this already as part of what we're talking about, we're going to be taken aback when it turns our system has a bunch of built-in inequities when it comes to this.

The other reason I am hammering this is because Governor Healey cut the charter school reimbursement, which already wasn't fully funded in the conference committee budget, by $20 million, one assumes because she thinks we don't have enough money to fund it. From the $199 million passed by the Legislature, she cut it back beyond even her own original recommendation to $179 million. 

Charter school reimbursement has layers as to how it is funded, which means that loss of nearly $20 million comes first out of the 40% reimbursement rate for fiscal year 2024. Based on the May projections, it will zero out that column*** with more needed, which, with $199 million in funding, was only funded at 52% or $13.9 million (full reimbursement would be $26.7 million).
Here's all the losses over a $1 million, just for that column: 

If you rattle off the highest need school districts, you'd have a list that looks a lot like this one, right?
And guess which districts in Massachusetts also have been hardest hit by the federal government's selecting some of the FY26 grants not to go through? I think we're beyond a double whammy on this one at this point.

The remaining $6 million will come out of the 60% reimbursement for FY25; we don't yet have those numbers, though I know the Department is working on them. 

Again, these are new cuts to a reimbursement line that was already underfunded. Because we don't have the money for a commitment that was made in the Student Opportunity Act. 

If in fact the commitment of the state is to have money set aside to cushion some of the blows of the federal government, this is a very strange start.

________________
*I'm told that this "correspondent" is an intern. Someone should follow up. We need people like this in education journalism!
**I've heard rumors that this may be an out-of-state consultant. So help me, if whomever it is knows less about how this works than I...
***scroll over to column CH for the 40% reimbursement for FY24