Photo: FY ’27 School Committee budget

The Belmont School Committee unanimously approved an $88.3 million fiscal year 2027 budget at its March 10 meeting.

The committee will ask the annual Town Meeting to approve the $74.0 million allocated to the schools from the town’s general fund. The remaining $14.3 million is made up of grants, revolving funds, and other accounts.

The all-in budget (the general fund and the other fund sources) is 9.3 percent above last fiscal year’s amount, while the town’s general funds allocation to the schools rose 4.8 percent, or $3.38 million.

There are two big-ticket items: educator and staff salaries making up three-quarters of the budget, followed by salaries, tuition, and transportation supporting special education at 18 percent.

“You’d see the vast majority of our funds are for staff salaries, which is typical for a [school] district in general,” said Tony DiCologero, director of Finance, Business and Operations.

“So after you look at those two categories together, that’s 93 percent of the school budget coming from the general fund. It doesn’t leave us a lot to do much beyond that,” said Amy Zuccarello, who chairs the finance subcommittee. “I do applaud that we’ve been able to do so much with so little, and I think it is due to where our focus has been.” 

The number of Belmont’s Full-Time Equivalent (FTEs) teaching and staff positions will exceed 600 in FY ’27, with the addition of 19 FTE’s from all sources, as the figure reaches 613.6.

Unlike pre-pandemic budgets, which were inherently completed late in the fiscal year as the town administration and school district sweated out final state-based local aid amounts, there is no surprise of what the school’s allocation will be after the town adopted a revenue-first budget process three years ago. 

There will be two one-time appropriations in the fiscal ’27 budget: $46,000 for the implementation of a Student Information System and funding for the continued adoption of the elementary-level curriculum plan, noted DiCologero.

Revolving funds – individual accounts for specific activities such as athletics, food services, and bus fees – will come in at $4.6 million, an increase of $700,000 from fiscal year ’26, reflecting greater
reliance on the fees for student activities and visual and performing arts, and so reducing the general
fund to this area.

The ’27 fiscal year will see the return of the federal and state grants line item account. During the COVID pandemic era, the district received a significant amount of one-time federal funds along with state recurring grants. That line item has been a considerable jump from $6.3 million to $9.5 million, which is largely due to the anticipated reimbursement and the district’s reliance on state “circuit breaker” funds based on Belmont’s special education tuition and transportation expenses, said DiCologero. 

“Ultimately, I think that this is a very good budget in light of what our available resources are,” said Zuccarello. “We can never predict exactly what the future is going to look like, but this is an educated, informed budget that I feel very happy to support.”