Opinion: Braintree School Budget Should Be The Priority

BRAINTREE, MA — The following opinion piece was written by Kelly Cobb-Lemire, a member of the Braintree School Committee. All opinions expressed are the author's own.

COVID-19 has put a tremendous strain on everyone in our community: working families, students - including those who require additional services - and of course, our teachers. Traditional education has been virtually impossible during this public health crisis, leaving teachers, administrators, parents, and students scrambling to find new approaches to learning. Even in districts without funding challenges, educating kids safely during a global pandemic is an enormous challenge. All students and families have been negatively affected. As a school committee member and parent of two children in the Braintree schools, I know firsthand how difficult it has been. It truly breaks my heart that two years of school traditions have been lost – and for many of our older students they cannot be made up.

Braintree, like other public school districts, relies on state and municipal tax revenues for the majority of its school funding. Our property tax rate is the lowest on the South Shore, and as a result, we depend heavily on tax revenue from commercial businesses. As a result of the COVID-19 crisis, the Mayor’s office recently announced that the town has a 10 Million revenue shortfall; and has requested that each department cut 10% from their budget. As one might imagine, reducing the school budget by 7.6 Million would be devastating to our students and teachers. And while we may be able to offset some cuts in the short term with one-time grants, we’ll be facing similar budget challenges over the next few years.

We need a better solution than having our schools absorb two thirds of the town’s lost revenue. Our schools have been underfunded for years, and it shows - our building infrastructure is crumbling, and our per pupil spending ratio is significantly less than state average. We have continually asked our teachers to do more with less and our students to do less with less. How can we, in good conscience, now expect them to make even bigger sacrifices in order to fix the town’s budget crisis?

Braintree parents and taxpayers must guarantee that all other town department budgets are scrutinized and considered for larger cuts before the school department is asked to make such drastic cuts. The Braintree School Department must work to guarantee a maintenance equity requirement so that services for the most vulnerable students are protected.

Our state and municipal leaders need to draw down their rainy day funds, close tax loopholes, raise new revenues, and explore other creative ways to protect educational funding and the wraparound services that benefit the children and families of Braintree. We must finally revive the millionaires’ tax which was overwhelmingly approved by both voters and lawmakers. We must tap into the $113 Million the state received in Cannabis Tax Revenue in 2020.

The President and Congress must enact federal aid – not only to make school districts whole, but to replace lost state and local tax revenues. Additionally, Congress must vote against any privatizing and commercializing of our public schools. They must demand that the Department of Education reduce the Chapter School Programs (CPS) monies not only because of the long history of siphoning money from public schools, but due to the misuse and lack of oversight especially those run by for-profit management companies.

We must make public colleges, universities, and trade schools tuition-free. We must fully fund Black colleges, increase funding for programs that assist low-income students and students with disabilities and first-generation students so they can attend and graduate college with a degree. We must place a cap on student loan interest rates and cancel the outstanding student debt for those young people who are weighed down by crushing student loans. The federal government has much deeper pockets than the states do and these costs could be defrayed by reallocating money that the government is already spending.

I believe in the importance of public education and collectively we can and must invest in our schools. We must ensure that every student has the high-quality public education they deserve from childcare and pre-kindergarten through college.

Kelly Cobb-Lemire