new educator contracts have made cuts due to new costs. With salary and benefits costs already making up 87% of the district’s budget, these increases place considerable budgetary pressure on the district to meet these growing employee costs while also maintaining a high level of quality education for its students. Our education stabilization fund was composed to help guard against this possibility for Newton but given new, added financial pressures (not regarding educator contracts), the district again finds itself in a difficult financial position. 3. Reliance on circuit breaker carryforward and use of one-time funding One of the more challenging aspects of the NPS budget over the last several years has been the reliance and use of one-time funding and Circuit Breaker carryforward funds to balance the budget. In FY26, the district required $3,350,000 in Circuit Breaker carry forward funding to balance our budget. Additionally, we used approximately $4.5M of City one time funds to also balance our FY26 budget, which has now been added to our base allocation. All of this one-time funding effectively helps to lower our budget gaps in each year, but when the funding does not recur, creates a budget gap in a future year. This structural deficit is not sustainable in the long term. Our FY27 budget was built with a planned $2,500,000 Circuit Breaker carryforward and we will attempt to continue to lower this carryforward dependency in future years. In order to realize this amount of carryforward, however, we have to create a self-imposed budget freeze on our FY 26 budget and not fully fund our work in this school year to fund the next. This long-standing process for NPS has been approved in prior administrations but is not favored nor recommended by the current superintendent. Managing finances in this way, shortchanges children in the current FY 26 budget to pay for subsequent years; this is an indicator of a budget that is overly restricted; so the community must know that year-over-year, the district self-imposes a spending freeze and therefore spends less than our allocation to run its schools–and therein, we are not able to run the robust slate of programs and services children need and Newton deserves. It is preferred that the school budget be increased to meet the demands placed upon it vs. using one-time funding small amounts agreed to without a longer-term plan/agreement. 4. Continued rising expenses - The Big Three (Utilities, Tuition, Substitutes) Beyond our rising salary and benefit costs, we are also experiencing substantial increases in three areas–due to a variety of reasons including higher usage, rates and inflationary pressure for FY27. The three main drivers below are responsible for approximately $2.8M of the $3.5 M expense increase and includes: • Utilities are projected to increase $962,000, mainly attributable to electricity costs for increased supply, delivery rates and higher usage at our buildings, given our large square footage with more air-conditioning. • Out-of-District Tuition is expected to increase by $942,00 increase, or nearly 20% . This represents a Gross Tuition cost of $18.3 M, which still carries risk in our assumptions. It should be known that these placements allow our young people to receive the most tailored and intensive educational program for their disabilities that are possible. If we cannot service young people in our system, we serve them in outplacements with
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