Superintendent’s Budget Message - April 2025
Dear Acton and Boxborough Residents, We present the FY2026 Budget with deep gratitude for your continued support, especially following last year's significant investment in our schools. We understand the financial constraints faced by our communities and acknowledge that the budgetary challenges of recent years reflect broader state and national trends in education funding. Despite your generous support, expenses continue to outpace revenues, a trend projected to persist unless the state revises its school funding formula. This budget also addresses a significant demographic shift: student enrollment has declined and is expected to continue declining slowly over the next 8 years. While overall enrollment has decreased, our population of high needs students (special education, multilingual/ English language learners, low income) in relation to overall enrollment has increased from roughly 25% to 33%. This change necessitated a strategic "right-sizing" of our general education staff to align with current enrollment while increasing the number of support staff that work with our students. Budget Guidelines and Realities The School Committee provided clear budget guidelines, aiming to balance student needs, staff support, and taxpayer responsibility. These guidelines included: • Prioritizing social-emotional, academic, multilingual, and special education supports • Limiting the overall budget increase to 3%, with a Boxborough assessment increase of no more than 6% • No use of Excess and Deficiency (reserves) funds in order to rebuild reserve accounts • Increasing capital funding for necessary facilities repairs and upgrades • Addressing contractual obligations, including wages, retirement, and health insurance • Reducing kindergarten tuition However, meeting all educational goals within revenue constraints is not possible, and we were unable to: • Add necessary support for our multilingual learners • Maintain our current level of reading and math support at the elementary level • Reduce tuition for Kindergarten families Recommended Budget and Assessments The Recommended FY26 Budget totals $116,791,164. The assessments for the towns are: • Acton: $79,959,269 (1.12%) • Boxborough: $16,824,370 (5.41%) • Maintaining general education class sizes within established guidelines • Implementing recommendations from the Elementary Budget Task Force • Utilizing staff attrition to manage reductions whenever possible
05/2025
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