The Fiscal Year 2026 budget that Gov. Maura Healey recently signed has a consequential provision: The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education must study municipal contributions to the public schools.
The report due out in June 2026 could lead to fiscal relief for many municipalities, assuming well-endowed communities pick up the slack.
By law, DESE must make recommendations about parts of the Chapter 70 school funding formula that exempt the wealthy from funding mandates: the 82.5% cap on local share and 59% municipal responsibility for the foundation budget.
The Chapter 70 formula calculates each school district’s enrollment, need and capacity to pay. The result is a multibillion estimation of public school costs, called the foundation budget.
However, DESE won’t examine base aid, which carries forward prior year funding, allowing regressive allocations to compound annually. Nor will DESE report on foundation budget adequacy. Essentially the Legislature’s constitutional duty — funding adequacy — will wait on a foundation budget review commission. Reformed requirements could fall short of current spending.
Already, the formula has helped rich communities make ends meet. That’s because districts where enrollment and need don’t merit more money get minimum per-pupil aid. At $150 per pupil, minimum aid notched a new record this year. Since minimum aid doesn’t discriminate, wealthy enclaves benefit, too.
The most well-resourced school district in Massachusetts is Provincetown. P-town can afford its foundation budget 13 times over, but it only owes part — 82.5% — because of the local share cap. Massachusetts will pay 19.8% of the tourist town’s foundation budget this year, more than some modest municipalities above the cap.
Few smaller towns receive even more. Conway gets 55% of its foundation budget as aid and Warwick, 66%. Both are above the cap. Such aberrant allocations could go to good use elsewhere.
Difficulty targeting aid to needs
Chapter 70 of the Massachusetts General Laws has a dual purpose: fair and adequate minimum per student funding.
That poses a policy dilemma. Roughly, per-pupil funding is inversely proportional to need. Due to the difficulty of recruiting educators to high-need districts, costs are higher.
The municipality with the highest foundation budget per-pupil ratio is Chelsea. Chelsea Public Schools has 47% English language learners and 79% low-income students. The funding level is only fair.
Similarly, many gateway cities and predominantly Black communities are dependent upon the foundation budget.
Minimal per-student funding persists throughout more homogenous towns in Massachusetts. Some of them, measured by wealth and income, exceed the local share cap.
But the Chapter 70 formula struggles to lift the middle of the wealth distribution. Policy interventions, like minimum aid and the 2019 Student Opportunity Act (SOA), aid the extremities.
Since then, the foundation budget increased quicker. But actual spending has not. As a percentage of required school spending, actual school spending peaked in FY18 after trending up since at least FY10.
Budgets stressed statewide
The DESE study originated with Sen. Jason Lewis of Winchester, who filed the amendment passed into law. In support, state Sen. Joanne Comerford of Northampton shared “the story of Amherst,” where, she said, school aid increased less than 1% in 17 years, while local obligations grew some 64%.
“That math does not work,” she stated. Reality in Bernardston, Greenfield, Orange and Hatfield, she added, is “similarly unworkable.”
For many of these towns, the Chapter 70 equation produced “teacher layoffs more than a dozen at a time, fractured relationships between city councils and school committees,” along with “school closures.”
Since 2007, Amherst’s local share rose. Then, it owed only 47% of its foundation budget. In 2025, it could afford more than the 82.5% cap. Amherst isn’t getting richer; household income growth has trailed the state’s. Instead, town enrollment decreased 44%.
Yearly, $9.6 million more of Amherst’s property taxes go to public schools at the higher required local contribution percentage.
In the last two decades, some large school systems increased enrollment and backslid on the amount they could afford. Costs shifted to other districts.
In Framingham, a district of about 10,000 students, enrollment increased by 18% since 2007. But the required local contribution went from 89% of the foundation budget to 47%.
Rightly, Framingham owes some $80 million less each year. Likewise in other mid-size districts: Auburn, Avon, Everett, Haverhill, Holden, Lunenburg, Marlborough, Milford, Monroe, Revere, Sturbridge, Webster and West Bridgewater.
All told, the Chapter 70 formula redistributes about $280.9 million of their costs to wealthier municipalities.
Similar to Amherst, Hubbardston, a district of 575, saw enrollment decline 57% while its contribution rate doubled.
Unworkable math might also describe the budgets of Millville and Oakham, or Savoy and Royalston.
For Gloucester state Sen. Bruce Tarr, “it is a moral imperative that we take action to do the undone work that the SOA did not fully address.”
Tarr, a Republican, stressed action with urgency. Since assessment should precede legislation, “we’re already at risk of having discontinuity between the end of the SOA and the beginning of the next chapter,” he said.
Tarr urged his colleagues to “strike a blow for equitable funding across the Commonwealth” and adopt the amendment calling for the budget study. The state Senate did.
Rep. Steven Ultrino proposed a similar amendment to the House budget emphasizing the Proposition 2½ limit on property tax hikes. Initially omitted by the House, final budget language will address that statute.
Local newspapers have revealed the problem statewide.
Tyngsborough’s budget has “unsustainable” elements, according to its superintendent in The Lowell Sun.
Lynnfield’s superintendent called their budget situation “brutal,” according to the Lynn Item Live. A $4.65 million tax override passed in June.
“I’ve never seen a budget so devastating,” the North Reading Transcript quoted a principal.
North Andover considered layoffs to address a $4 million shortage.
The Bedford Citizen reported on a $1 million gap in school funding, recently filled.
The superintendent of Bridgewater-Raynham pleaded for an override, according to the Taunton Gazette.
And, in Peabody, a $5.6 million budget gap may necessitate cuts.
Jessica Tang, president of the American Federation of Teachers-Massachusetts, added Amesbury to the list. Amesbury, she said, “without an override, a successful override, would have cuts as well.”
“I’m not even talking about level funding,” Tang reiterated, “I’m talking about actual cuts.”
She described broad budget woes. “I don’t think it’s just the North Shore,” she said. “It’s hard to deny that our schools are struggling and the budgets are inadequate.”
“There has been some hesitancy to revisit the whole foundation budget review commission,” she summarized.
Although Tang described this year’s education funding levels as “good news,” she was attentive to the study’s limits, calling it a “subset of the larger conversation.”
The foundation budget review commission is “supposed to be every 10 years,” she recalled. The last began in 2015. The next, Tang said, is “actually overdue.”
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