‘A Brave Decision’: Selectmen Place $4.5M Override Vote on Town Election Ballot

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Photo: Belmont Superintendent John Phelan speaking to the Belmont Board of Selectmen and the School Committee on Tuesday, Feb. 17.

The Belmont Board of Selectmen unanimously voted Tuesday night, Feb. 18, to place before voters a $4.5 million Proposition 2 1/2 override that will coincide with the annual Town Election set for Tuesday, April 7.

“I think we should make a brave decision to place the appropriate override on the ballot,” said Selectman Sami Baghdady as the three-member board decided not to delay a decision on the override until next week’s selectmen’s meeting.

“There, it’s on the ballot,” said Andy Rojas, chair of the board to the applause from two dozen residents and members of the Belmont Education Association, the union representing teachers and staff in the district.

This is the first override question facing Belmont voters since the unsuccessful attempt in June 2010 when residents rejected a $2.5 million initiative targeting schools and roads, 53 percent to 47 percent. A $2 million roads override was defeated by the same percentage in 2008.

The vote came after a joint meeting of the Selectmen and Belmont School Committee which heard Belmont School Superintendent John Phelan present the stark budgetary options facing the school district in the coming fiscal year which starts on July 1.

Under a budget relying on anticipated revenues for fiscal 2016, the school district will face a $1.7 million funding gap that will be resolved by eliminating 22 full-time teaching and staff positions, allow class sizes to exceed the district’s benchmarks for effective teaching and increase fees for all student activities.

“We really felt that this was important for Belmont,” Rojas told the Belmontonian after the vote.

“We hear all sides [of the override issue], and I certainly understand and we will try to mitigate the impact on the elderly and those on fixed incomes. However, once you see the presentation by [Phelan] and where the available budget leads you, it’s almost negligent not to consider an override,” said Rojas.

“Whatever the outcome of the vote, the efforts of the Financial Task Force will not die,” said Baghdady.

Before voting for the measure, the selectmen each spoke of the override as just one component of a wider approach to tackling the structural deficit facing the town and schools, recommendations raised in the final report of the Financial Task Force, the Selectmen appointed committee that spent a year analyzing Belmont’s long-range financial outlook.

“We are taking all the Task Force’s recommendations very seriously. It will include reforms both structurally and non-structural, it’s creativity on how we run both government and schools and, of course, making sure we fund the programs that are obviously the key part of the override,” said Rojas.

The vote came after a joint meeting of the Selectmen, and Belmont School Committee heard Belmont School Superintendent John Phelan present the budgetary options facing the school district in the coming fiscal year which starts on July 1.

“I should know this as this is the fourth time in six days I’ve made the presentation,” said Phelan told the joint meeting.

Reiterating in detail the pressures facing the school district in his meeting with the School Committee last Thursday, Feb. 12, (see “Belmont Schools Face ‘Significant, Negative Impact’ in Fiscal ’16 Budget; Loss of 22 Positions, Larger Class Sizes” Feb. 12) Phelan presented a stark reality for education in Belmont under an available revenue budget in the next school year: Staff cuts, greater class sizes, less material and supplies, an increase in free time and study halls for middle and high school students and higher fees for students and parents.

Speaking of the student fee increase, families with two children in athletics, a club, and the arts, “you very quickly get to $6,000 to $7,000,” said Phelan.

Phelan told the board the cuts will have a human face to them at next week’s School Committee when he and the Leadership Council – made up of senior staff, principals and department and curriculum heads – pinpoint specific positions and areas which will be eliminated.

“It’s a very disturbing picture,” said Phelan, noting that 80 percent of the school budget “is people so the biggest part of the cuts will be from there.”

As with the previous presentations, Phelan told the meeting the Task Force’s recommendation of a $4.5 million override to stabilize town expenditures will allow the district to keep existing staff and teachers, meet state-mandated required hirings due to a doubling of students requiring English Learning tutoring as well as new hires to meet the exploding enrollment and reduce the free time an ever increasing number of middle and high school students are handed.

“There are no new bikes” in the budget with the $4.5 million increase, said Phelan; the district will not introduce new classes, only retaining the current level of instruction.

“We do believe that we are at a crossroads,” Phelan said of the district, adding that he and the Leadership Council “believe the town needs to make an investment in the schools.”

During a citizen comment period, several teachers and residents expressed their support for the override to assist them in educating Belmont students.

“We teach children, I teach children,” said Dori Pulizzi, a seven-year veteran teacher at the Chenery Middle School. But the only way to effectively do so is with a ratio that she can meet the social/emotional needs of each student. With 28 in a class, Pulizzi said she can only give each student a minute of her time within a 50-minute class after providing the class lesson.

Suzanne Pomponio, a third grade teacher at the Winn Brook with 23 students in her class, said teaching “is just getting harder for students to do what is expected with the demands of Common Core [being introduced to Belmont schools].”

“It’s more stressful for the students, and they need that emotional support but we have less and less time to provide it,” said Pomponio.

After the vote, John Sullivan, the president of the BEA and a Belmont resident, said a vote for the override “is a chance to maintain quality of our outstanding schools.”

“Now we need to get community support, to work together to provide Belmont teachers what they need,” said Sullivan.

 

Belmont Business Leader Backs School District as Selectmen Discuss Override Tonight

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Photo: Robert Mahoney (right) of Belmont Savings Bank with Ellen Schreiber. 

As the Belmont Board of Selectmen prepare to discuss tonight, Tuesday, Feb. 17, a recommendation from the Financial Task Force for a possible property tax increase to fund the town’s structural budget deficit, one of Belmont’s leading business leaders has threw his support behind the town’s school district as it faces substantial cuts in staff and programs under current budget assumptions for next year.

Belmont Savings Bank’s President and CEO Robert Mahoney wrote a comment to an article in the Belmontonian (Belmont Schools Face ‘Significant, Negative Impact’ in Fiscal ’16 Budget; Loss of 22 Positions, Larger Class Sizes, Feb. 12) that highlighted a pending $1.7 million gap in the district’s fiscal 2016 budget if the schools are required to work within the available revenue that the town has calculated for next year.

Mahoney is the first prominent individual outside of the district to speak out concerning the negative impact on Belmont from possible inaction in securing the necessary funding to keep town schools high ranked.

“[Belmont Superintendent] John Phelan is so right. It took decades for Belmont’s schools to become top tier. At the rate we are going we will be third tier soon,” Mahoney bluntly wrote in a comment posted Feb. 14.

“Once the parents of high potential students move out, and they will, the biggest economic engine in Belmont will sputter to mediocrity and property values will quickly follow the schools down. This is not theory. This pattern has happened over and over in short-sighted communities that have not invested in their future,” Mahoney wrote.

In the past few years, Belmont Savings has become more involved in Belmont, starting a foundation to assist organizations and individuals funding community activities. The most prominent of those was the foundation’s donation of $200,000 this fall that jump started a community drive to raise $400,000 to start construction of a new Underwood Pool adjacent to Concord Avenue.

At Tuesday’s Board of Selectmen meeting – at 6 p.m. in the Selectmen’s room at Town Hall – the board will join up with the Belmont School Committee for a presentation from the district concerning the pending $1.7 million deficit in the pending fiscal ’16 available revenue budget totaling $47.5 million. In two previous public meetings to discuss the budget, Phelan has said the rapid increase in enrollment over the past five years and for years to come has sent expenses skyrocketing as the district. Phelan has advocated the selectmen call for, and voters pass a three-year, $4.5 million Proposition 2 1/2 override to fund the gap.

After the budget meeting, the Selectmen will reconvene to discuss placing an override before voters. If it decides to move in that direction, the board will also have to set a date for the override vote.

 

 

Belmont Schools Face ‘Significant, Negative Impact’ in Fiscal ’16 Budget; Loss of 22 Positions, Larger Class Sizes

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Photo: Teacher and staff represented by the Belmont Education Association listening to District Superintendent John Phelan present the fiscal 2016 school budget to the Belmont School Committee on Wednesday, Feb. 11.

Belmont students will face “significant and negative impacts” if the Belmont School Committee approves an available revenue budget for the next fiscal year leaving the town’s top-rated schools with an anticipated $1.7 million shortfall, according to Belmont District Superintendent John Phelan.

The current budget would force Phelan to eliminate up to 22 full-time positions including teachers and staff, allow classroom sizes in all grades to exceed the School Committee’s own benchmarks for effective teaching and increase the number of “frees” and study halls for middle and high school students.

“It would be problematic for the district to function as a Tier 1 district under this budget,” Phelan told the Belmontonian Thursday, Feb. 12.

Making the first public presentation of the fiscal 2016 budget before the School Committee and approximately 75 teachers and staff at the Chenery Middle School, Phelan presented an overview of its fiscal year 2016 budget in which the district would run on the best estimates of the available revenue from state and town sources.

Under the town’s estimates, the schools will receive $47.5 million in fiscal ’16 under the current Town Meeting approved 58/42 budget “split” in which the district receives 58 percent of total revenues.

Belmont is already doing a great deal of what it has, said Phelan. Where the average annual expenditure per student statewide is $14,571, Belmont has become an educational destination for homebuyers spending roughly $12,800 a year.

In the presentation, Phelan told the committee the district finds itself facing several “pressure points,” the most immediate is the skyrocketing increase in enrollment. In just the past five years – 2009 to 2014 – the student population in kindergarten to 12th grade has increased by 317 students to 4,222 in October, 2014.

And the forecast is that an additional 408 students will enter the district by 2019, a ten-year increase of 723 pupils. For comparison, the Wellington Elementary School has approximately 440 students.

Phelen said the increasing population has also bumped up the number of students requiring assistance in English Language learning by nearly double in two years, 117 in 2013 to 222 in 2015. Because about 80 of those students are not very proficient in English, the state requires Belmont to hire new staff to provide 2.5 hours of “small group instruction.”

Also in the overall population is a growing number special education students. The major component of the current year’s $500,000 school deficit is nearly $950,000 in unanticipated costs associated with special education. And those costs will increase in fiscal 2016 with the rising number of students entering the district.

When calculating the new costs required to the current “pressure points” and moving the current level of staff and teachers into the new year, the schools will need $49.2 million just to “stay current.”

But with rising costs and stagnate revenue, Phelan said schools will be unable to meet the demands of the residents and students for a top-tier education as it attempts to fill the $1.7 million gap.

“With enrollments going up, and the number of positions staying steady if not being reduced, I would be hard pressed to say we can continue what we are doing,” Phelan told the Belmontonian.

The cuts would be deep and substantial: 22 full-time positions from teaching, staff and aids would be cut, a further reduction in material and supplies, trimming professional development, forego building maintenance, increase the fees to rent school property and a large increase in student and family fees for sports, clubs and full-time kindergarten.

What isn’t seen in the cost cutting will be more students in each classroom, less programs and idle teens “sitting on benches in the high school and in study halls at the Chenery,” said Phelan.

“This can only negatively impact student learning.”

The solution in Phelan’s eye and, in previous discussions with the School Committee, is to enthusiastically support the proposal outlined last month by the Financial Task Force to request the Board of Selectmen to place a three-year, $4.5 million Proposition 2 1/2 override on the ballot to fund the enrollment issues facing the district.

“That is the solution,” he said.

John Sullivan, a Palfrey Road resident, Belmont teacher and president of the Belmont Education Association which represents district teachers in union negotiations, told the board that despite a highly trained and capable staff, class size impacts the day-to-day experience of students.

“If Belmont wants to maintain a high-quality student experience, one that puts Belmont High in the top 10 percent of high school state-wide, then the fiscal year ’16 budget, and future budgets, need to address the increase in enrollment,” said Sullivan.

Belmont’s League of Women Voters’ Candidate’s Night Set for March 26

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The nomination papers are not due into the Town Clerk’s Office until Tuesday, Feb. 17, but the Belmont League of Women Voters has selected the date for the League’s annual Candidate’s Night.
The highlight of the election season will take place on Thursday, March 26 at 7:30 p.m. at the Chenery Middle School, 95 Washington St.
The League will conduct the evening following its traditional order: those seeking Town Meeting membership are welcome to introduce themselves to the public – no speeches, thank you – then questions from a League panel for the unopposed town-wide candidates before ending the evening with a series of questions and some debating issues by those candidates in contested town-wide races.

 

Bursting Enrollment Makes Modular Classrooms Likely at Belmont Schools by 2016

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Photo: An example of modular classrooms in Needham, Massachusetts.

In the past two years, Belmont town and school officials have used the idiom that the school district has been “bursting at the seams” with the rapid increase in student enrollment – 330 more students – since 2009.

Now that figurative phrase is becoming literally true as the number of pupils continue rocketing upward will likely require the district to begin using modular classrooms – single-story prefabricated buildings most notably used in Belmont to house Wellington Elementary students as the new school was being built – to house the surge of children, according to Belmont Superintendent John Phelan.

Phelan made the observation at two recent meeting in January when the executive summary report of the Belmont Financial Task Force was presented to the public and the Belmont Board of Selectmen.

It doesn’t require a lengthy report to realize that with any increase in enrollment, “the need for increased classroom space is inevitable,” said Phelan.

The first steps to quantify the impact on school buildings began more than a year ago under former Superintendent Dr. Thomas Kingston who established a Space Task Force. One of the first actions taken was hiring a local architectural firm to project the district’s building requirements with the space it had and the estimated number of students coming into the system.

The study concluded for Belmont to keep within its appropriate class-size range, the elementary schools will require an additional class from kindergarten through 4th grade.

“This would result in the need for modular classrooms … by September 2016” for the elementary schools, said Phelan.

The report bluntly stated the Chenery Middle School “does not have enough space to support the current level of student enrollment” and won’t be able to fit the large classes funneling from the four elementary schools in the next five years.

The solution “will result in the need for modular classrooms” by the beginning of the 2016-17 school year.

Nor is the situation at the aging Belmont High School any better. The school is currently “out of space,” said the report, with 31 rooms shared by two teachers and four rooms by three teachers.

With the demand for additional class offerings and “the wave” of enrollment increases coming each year,” the need for space at the High School is becoming critical,” said Phelan.

The “wave” Phelan talked about is evident comparing the 260 students who graduated in 2014 with the 354 students who entered Kindergarten that same year. And those numbers are not seen dropping as “[h]istorical enrollment trends indicate there is little if any, net loss of enrollment over the grade spans.”

In its long-term plan to meet the sky-high enrollment issues facing Belmont, the school district will request hiring an additional 20 teachers over three years beginning in the 2015-16 school year, all dependent on the passage of a $4.5 million Proposition 2 1/2 override sometime in the spring.

A major new initiative by Phelan will be to target eight of the new teachers to reduce the chronic issue of student either sitting in large study halls in the middle school and having idle time at the high school known as “frees.”

The Board of Selectmen has yet to approve or set a date for the override as of Feb. 11.

Even with a successful override vote, space will continue to be a glaring handicap for the schools.

“If you want to increase the number of teachers at the middle or high school to reduce the amount of unstructured, non-educational time … the district will struggle with the ability to do so, without adding temporary space or building more permanent space,” warned Phelan.

 

Less Than a Week to Turn In Town Meeting, Town Wide Nomination Papers

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The good news, said Belmont Town Clerk Ellen Cushman, is the number of residents who took out nomination papers will result in competitive races in nearly all of Belmont’s eight precincts.

The bad news, see added, is that many potential candidates have yet to turn in those papers with the signature of 25 Belmontians to her.

“They’ve taken them out, and now I’m waiting for them to bring them back,” said Cushman today, Feb. 11.

And the deadline for the papers to be in and certified by Cushman is looming quite large.

“They only have six day, until Feb. 17 at 5 p.m. And when the bell rings, they’ll lose their chance,” said Cushman, pointing to a call bell next to the old-style time stamp machine on the Office’s front desk.

Belmont’s eight precincts will be electing 12 Town Meeting Members in addition to any partial-term seats. Cushman opened a folder for one of the precincts and showed the sign-out sheet with several names of residents who took out papers. Only one had  been turned in.

People should not wait until the last minute to return nomination papers for either Town Meeting or for those with intentions of running for town-wide office, said Cushman, reminding residents her and all town offices will be closed for the President’s Day Holiday on Monday, Feb. 16.

Water Main Break Halts Traffic on Brighton/Blanchard, Repair by 4 PM

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A major water main broke around 9 a.m., Tuesday, Feb. 10, on the north side of Brighton Street at the commuter rail tracks, causing the closure of an important cross town thoroughfare.

Belmont Police detoured traffic off of Blanchard Road from Concord Avenue to the commuter tracks and Brighton Street to Vale Road and the tracks to allow Department of Public Work crews to remove and repair the pipe that spewed water onto the roadway for a short time.

“We found a major crack in the pipe so it had to be removed and a new section cut at the DPW yard,” said Mark Mancuso, operations manager of the DPW’s Water Division.

There was some concern from the MBTA the water from the leak could freeze onto the commuter rail tracks, said Mancuso. That problem did not materialize, he added.

Mancuso said the pipe should be replaced and the road reopened by 4 p.m.

 

School Closed Tuesday; Full Parking Ban Ends 7AM Tuesday But Parking Limited to Odd Side

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Once again, the Belmont Public Schools will be closed on Tuesday, Feb. 10 due to the nearly 20 inches of snow that fell on Monday.

Also on Tuesday, the full Snow Emergency Parking Ban will be lifted at 7 a.m. Until that time, a full parking ban will be in effect, including on-street parking as well as municipal and school parking lots. Violators will be ticketed and towed.

After 7 a.m., the partial Snow Emergency Parking Rules will be in effect which limits parking on most streets to the odd-numbered side of the street.

Trash will be picked up on normal schedule

While the Beech Street Center will remain closed on Tuesday, Belmont’s two libraries, the Belmont Public and the Benton, will be open for regular hours.

Belmont Schools Closed Monday, Emergency Parking Ban In Effect 6 PM Sunday

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The instructions on shampoo bottles once had a familiar description: “Lather, rinse, repeat” which, if taken literally, would result in an endless loop of repeating the same steps.

In the past two weeks, it has appeared the Belmont has been in that endless loop as for the third time in two weeks, the town will effectively shut down due to yet another snow storm heading into eastern Massachusetts. 

  • The Belmont Public Schools will be closed on Monday, Feb. 9, due to the day-long  storm that is expected to drop up to a foot of snow on the town.
  • In addition, the Belmont Public Library and the Beech Street Center will be closed on Monday.
  • Beginning at 6 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 8, the town is declaring a snow emergency during which there will be a parking ban on on-street parking and in the three town municipal and six public school parking lots.
  • Trash and recycling pickup will occur on Monday despite the storm.