School Committee votes to reject mayor’s budget, endorses superintendent’s vision 

The School Committee decided at its June 10 meeting to ask City Council for the $136 million budget proposed by Superintendent Marisa Mendonsa for the upcoming fiscal year. 

The decision is a rebuke of Mayor Jeannette A. McCarthy’s $129 million counter-recommendation, which dropped several administrative positions Mendonsa views as critical for improving Waltham High School academic performance.

The school board’s vote came at an emergency session called to try to resolve the $7.7 million gap between the two budgets. 

The School Committee unanimously agreed to ask City Council for the extra $7.7 million to cover what was cut in McCarthy’s  budget proposal. Although McCarthy is chair of the School Committee, she did not participate in the vote to seek the money from City Council.

City councilors received McCarthy’s budget proposals for fiscal 2027 for all city departments two weeks ago, and councilors questioned Mendonsa about the gap at its budget hearings last Tuesday.

When the council meets to pass a city budget for FY27, which starts July 1, it will not be able to directly add to the budget or cut specific line items from the School Department. If City Council decides to cut the School Department’s overall funding, the superintendent and School Committee would decide where to make cuts.

Superintendent advocates for new positions

Mendonsa opened the meeting with a direct defense of her budget proposal, which included why she believes the new administrative positions are necessary. “Education today is not what it was 10 or even 20 years ago,” she said. “The needs of students have changed. The expectations placed on schools have changed.”

She pushed back on the perception that the new positions were bureaucratic bloat. “When I propose assistant principals … it’s because I believe they are the most important investments we can make,” she said. “When the ratio between teachers and administrators is too high, the support is spread too thin.”

At City Council’s budgeting hearings, she emphasized that her proposal only contained four new administrative positions, adding that Waltham’s ratio of administrators to teachers is low for the area. “Our admin ratio, if you compared us to … the communities around us, Framingham, Natick, etc., we are at the bottom in terms of the ratio between teacher to administrator.”

Budget documents showed that the positions excluded from McCarthy’s budget go beyond the two assistant principals and a career and technical education director, new positions that dominated the debate at the June 3 School Committee meeting. Proposed new positions also include a special education teacher, a certified nursing assistant at MacArthur Elementary, a second HVAC teacher for WHS’s career and technical education program, an HR generalist, a graduation and attendance specialist, and a school adjustment counselor at MacArthur to help with rising admission numbers.

School Committee member Elizabeth Aljammal asked McCarthy directly why she had reduced the budget. “I’ve been involved in many budgeting cycles, and the mayor has always prioritized our schools. There must be a reason that I’m not understanding as to what is going on this time,” she said. 

McCarthy responded that she funded fiscal 2027 at the same amounts as fiscal 2026 and only made adjustments for personnel. She said she is waiting on information from the Auditor’s Department on the School Department’s finances, and until she received that information, she was unwilling to comment further. 

Mendonsa said the nonpersonnel accounts that McCarthy funded at last year’s levels leave contractual cost increases for utilities, transportation and other operating expenses unfunded. These are costs the district must pay to keep schools running, she said.

Chad Mazza, assistant superintendent of finance, said the costs of school buses are “going up considerably” as are utilities costs, which have spiked since opening the new high school. 

Council concerns

At City Council’s first day of budget hearings last Tuesday, multiple councilors expressed concerns about continual budget increases for the district.

Councilor-at-Large Randall J. LeBlanc pointed out that if the school’s budget continued growing annually by this year’s requested 11%, its budget would double within six and a half years. 

He said 11% annual increases for any city department is not sustainable, noting taxes don’t increase 11% year over year. However, he said a one-time increase of that size in a given department would not “make or break” Waltham.

Some of the positions Mendonsa proposed adding, such as the two assistant principal positions in the high school, were previously proposed positions that had been cut from past years’ budgets. 

Mendonsa said the city would see a positive impact within four years if she received the funding needed to staff the district the way she thought it required. She added that her proposed FY27 budget wouldn’t fund all the positions she wants but is “pretty close.”

Ward 6 Councilor Sean Durkee urged the council to fund the School Department as requested by Mendonsa, saying it was necessary to drive improvements. “I like what I see,” he added, riffling through a School Department budget handout. “For me to second-guess [Mendonsa] would be ridiculous.”