School Committee approves Sustainability Policy
The School Committee voted unanimously at their January 16 business meeting to approve a revised environmental Sustainability Policy. The updated policy strengthens the District’s commitment to renewable energy technologies and energy and resource conservation.
The District will provide annual reports documenting greenhouse gas reduction efforts, progress toward meeting energy efficiency targets by 2050 in alignment with state goals, and associated capital costs.
The updated Sustainability Policy formally endorses educational opportunities that integrate the teaching and learning of environmentally sustainable practices into units of study in classrooms and facilitates students making connections beyond the classroom. The policy also defines measures to ensure healthy and safe environments for students and staff, including indoor air quality and use of cleaning and pest control products that minimize environmental impact and exposure to hazardous chemicals.
The Acton-Boxborough Regional High School student group, Resource Force, was instrumental in moving the policy update forward and worked with the School Committee’s Policy Subcommittee to bring the updated policy to fruition.
Facilities Department reports on short-term capital projects and long-term planning
Updates on current and future capital projects were on the agenda at the Dec. 19 School Committee meeting. The District’s Capital Projects Infrastructure Manager Brendan Hearn and the Facilities Coordinator Marc Hamel presented the update.
Projects scheduled to be completed this year include a partial roof replacement for the Administration Building at 15 Charter Road, improvements to the High School chemistry lab storage area, and resurfacing the tennis courts at the High School and the Junior High School. Also on the docket this year is chlorination of the Hagar well in Boxborough. The well provides water for four Boxborough properties including the Blanchard Elementary School. Hearn explained that though the Town of Boxborough does the actual work, the Regional School District pays for the portion of costs related to Blanchard’s water use and treatment.
Hearn reported that HVAC systems in aging buildings continue to require ongoing repair. The Facilities Department was forced to defer an engineering study to guide conversion of rooftop air conditioning units at the High School to more energy efficient air source heat pumps so that urgent repairs could be made to HVAC systems at the Junior High School and Parker-Damon Building. “Controls at the Junior High School started failing this fall,” Hearn said. “At the Parker-Damon building, a chiller plant, which is responsible for almost all the air conditioning in the building, failed right after school let out last year. We are trying to get it back online before cooling season is upon us.”
On a happier note, the Blanchard Elementary School playground is scheduled to receive its first major upgrade since 2005. The project was funded with over 150K in community donations, the result of a multi-year fundraising campaign led by former Blanchard Principal Dana Labb. Boxborough voters approved an allocation for the project from the Town’s Community Preservation fund at their annual Town Meeting in May 2024. The new, more modern and safer playground will be accessible to individuals with limited mobility.
Projects planned for 2025-26 focus on upgrades related to safety such as resurfacing degraded asphalt surfaces, extending fencing, upgrading pager systems and school bus cameras, and, at the High School, rekeying doors. The Facilities Department will also continue to work on HVAC and other mechanical systems and weatherization in the District’s aging buildings. At the new Boardwalk Campus, the Facilities Department will be looking into noise reduction options in the library, which is located in a two-story, open space within the building.
“We have more than forty men and women in the Facilities Department that do an outstanding job,” Hearn said. “Their efforts are what keep projects in-house and off the capital improvement plan list.” Hearn reported that the Facilities Department budgeted $700,000 for capital projects this year and will request $1million for projects in 2025-26.
Long term capital improvement planning over the next decade and beyond will be guided by two new facilities condition assessments (FCA). Hearn told the School Committee that “these FCAs were very helpful in providing us with information about the age, condition, and expected lifespan of building systems and will help us identify future priorities in terms of which systems need to be replaced and when.”
The report, completed by the firm Bureau Veritas, excluded the new Boardwalk Campus, which opened in 2022 and houses the Douglas and Gates Elementary Schools and Carol Huebner Early Childhood Program. A separate facilities assessment for the Charter Road athletic fields, concessions buildings and Dow track was completed by Gale Associates.
Capital improvement projects over the next decade will focus on upgrades to aging mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, and roofs, windows, walls, doors and other components of the “building envelope” at school buildings constructed or renovated between 1995 and 2005 and which are beginning to reach the end of their expected useful life (EUL).
Hearn told the School Committee that “EUL is one of several metrics we use and helps us keep an eye on when to expect major systems will need to be upgraded.” Hamel added that “health and safety, a key metric for prioritizing projects, has to be priority number one and can knock other projects off the list or postpone them.”
Yet another factor impacting priority-setting of capital projects is a decarbonization roadmap, formally adopted by the School Committee in June 2024. The Decarb Roadmap proposes a timeline to transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy in alignment with statewide targets that call for an overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of fifty percent below 1990 levels by 2030 with the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. State-wide progress can be tracked here. Hearn told the School Committee that he views the roadmap as an important source to inform capital planning. Projects that meet requirements for state or federal funding were tagged in the capital improvement plan presentation.
School Committee deliberates on the pros and cons of keeping optional vacation days on the school calendar for 2025-26
School Committee members expressed discomfort with the number of vacation days on the school calendar which, they argue, extends the 2025-26 school year too far into June. Members weighed in on the pros and cons of eliminating vacation days that are not required by law.
The School Committee is scheduled to vote on the 2025-26 school calendar at their January 30 business meeting.
Superintendent of Schools Peter Light presented a draft of the 2025-26 school calendar to the School Committee for a first read at their January 16 meeting. “The last scheduled day of school with no snow days is June 18. With five snow days, that would tentatively make June 26 the last day of school,” said Mr. Light.
School Committee member Lakshmi Kaja expressed support for eliminating vacation days. Kaja asked Committee members to consider that the practice of giving days off to acknowledge cultural and religious traditions may in fact create economic hardship for community members. “When my kids were in school, I used up all my time-off taking care of my kids when they were sick. I could not find any other time when I could take more days off to celebrate cultural holidays, even if it was mine,” Kaja said.
School Committee member Ben Bloomenthal, who opposes eliminating optional vacation days, evoked longstanding community sentiment that holding school on major holidays forces families to choose between sending their child to school or observing their important holiday as a family. “I don’t think it’s fair to infer that [adding optional vacation days to the calendar] is a hardship for all families,” Bloomenthal said.
Member Ginny Kremer warned her School Committee peers that families may not appreciate having a shorter summer break, yet “removing cultural or religious celebrations from the school calendar leaves us in the position of deciding which holidays are more important than others, and that’s an impossible decision. We have learned in the past that even if we were to hold school on certain days, we may need to hire substitute teachers due to educator absences.” School Committee Vice Chair, Rebeccah Wilson inquired about extending to families the option of affordable childcare on vacation days through Acton-Boxborough Community Education. Superintendent Light told the Committee that staffing Community Education programs has been a barrier to program expansion.
“We have tried to represent every community’s special day in our calendar, and we are getting to the breaking point,” said School Committee Chair, Adam Klein.
Superintendent of Schools Peter Light added, “This is the first time that every observance that we have chosen to recognize falls on a weekday. We knew this would happen eventually, but it does stress the system. The reality is that people are already making plans for next year. We don’t have a month and a half or six weeks to make major changes to this calendar. If you want to revisit the calendar, my recommendation would be to consider a long-term strategy and convene a subcommittee that can actively seek out and collect community feedback and dialogue with stakeholders.”
Elementary Budget Task Force identifies potential savings as the District faces a fourth year of cuts
Facing a fourth year of budget cuts, the Acton-Boxborough Regional School Committee is looking to an Elementary Budget Task Force for guidance in prioritizing areas to reduce spending in 2025-26. The results of the Task Force’s work were shared at the School Committee’s December 19 business meeting by School Committee member Tori Campbell, who led the Task Force, and Nate Levenson, President of the consulting firm, New Solutions K12 (NSK12).
NSK12 was brought in to analyze current spending and identify a set of options for what might be scaled back or done differently or more efficiently to lower expenses while still optimizing student outcomes. The work is the result of a commitment made by the School Committee during last year’s budget deliberations to identify ways to make the best use of the community’s limited resources in a fiscal climate requiring austere budgeting.
The District is reportedly facing a budget deficit in 2025-26 of between $2.3 and $2.5 million.
The twenty-five-member, multi-stakeholder Task Force worked with NSK12 from October through December to vet and prioritize options for consideration by the School Committee.
Off the table are the options of closing a school, increasing class sizes in elementary general education classrooms and eliminating open enrollment, the practice of offering families the option to choose any of the six elementary schools through a lottery system when enrolling a child in kindergarten.
Regarding increasing elementary general education class sizes, Levenson reported that “there is no opportunity to combine classrooms in a school and still be within class size guidelines set by School Committee policy. You would have to add five students to your average class size to realize cost savings. It did not seem a worthwhile recommendation because you already have a very efficient way of filling vacancies within a school through the open enrollment process.” Superintendent of Schools Peter Light added that “an alternative is to randomly transfer students all over the District in order to grow and balance class sizes. We determined last year that this was an untenable option.”
Regarding open enrollment, Levenson reported the single most recommended option widely believed to be a major cost driver for the District both among Task Force members and by more than 400 of 700 survey respondents was transportation savings that might be realized by eliminating open enrollment. Levenson told the School Committee that “what we found was that there is not an opportunity to save money through open enrollment. Your transportation is efficient as measured by the number of drivers and buses needed and hours on the road, and as a regional school system, you are reimbursed at a high level [by the state] for transportation costs.” Transportation costs for the District are about 0.3 percent of the budget.
NSK12 data indicate that moving to the more traditional model of assigning families to neighborhood schools would cost the District between $400K and $700K. School Committee member Tori Cambell told members that “one of the hardest realizations in this process was that changes in transportation and open enrollment aren’t going to generate the savings we’re looking for.”
What the Task Force did recommend was consideration of a series of structural changes that will require making difficult choices between competing priorities.
A top priority of the Task Force was adjusting the schedules of certified elementary reading and math specialists to free up more time for these specialist teachers to deliver targeted, small group instruction to slightly larger groups of five students with similar needs for a minimum of sixty-five percent of the school day. The schedule change would also afford these specialist teachers the flexibility to work with groups in more than one school building so that more students identified in need of additional support have a better chance to catch up to their grade level peers.
Levenson noted that sharing staff between elementary schools, which would be a new practice in Acton-Boxborough, would correct a gross imbalance in caseloads across schools by allowing principals to flexibly assign specialist teachers when and where there is more student-need instead of using a one-per-building approach.
The Task Force recommended a similar approach for specialists providing instruction to students who are multilingual learners, specialists providing mental health support, and special educators working with students with disabilities.
Levenson told the School Committee that precision in staffing could save the District $500K but would require unified scheduling across elementary schools to make this work and a common measure to determine student need. “It takes a high level of organization and cooperation to share staff,” Levenson said. “By carefully managing schedules and small group sizes, the District can either serve more students with the same number of staff or serve the existing number of students with fewer staff,” said Levenson. This is a decision the School Committee will face during this budget season.
The Task Force also prioritized changes that would impact art, music, physical education and library teachers by moving these positions either to part-time, shared between schools, or multi-hat, full-time equivalent employees. Either way, “you are not reducing one minute of services,” Levenson said. “You are, however, changing the way these services are delivered.”
Levenson shared that though “a one-per-school staffing model benefits school culture and the ability to build relationships with students, we are seeing across the country a fairly rapid movement away from one-per-school as budgets have gotten tighter and tighter. Districts are hiring part-time employees while others have committed to fewer full-time positions that are shared across buildings.”
School Committee Vice Chair Rebeccah Wilson questioned the feasibility of sharing staff between school buildings, noting concerns expressed by teachers during the School Committee’s public comment period that working in more than one building would compromise their ability to maintain strong relationships with students and the school community, and make it more difficult to collaborate with teachers and other specialists. Levenson responded that there are about 30,000 elementary schools in the United States that have their staff move between buildings. “This is something people learn to do, especially as budgets have tightened. There has been lots of discussion about how to do it in a thoughtful, reasonable way that accounts for things like school proximity. You do have schools extraordinarily close to each other,” Levenson said.
According to School Committee member Tori Campbell, there was also nearly unanimous support among Task Force members to reduce reliance on general education elementary classroom assistants by between twenty-five and fifty percent.
Teachers who attended the December 19 and January 16 School Committee meeting spoke passionately to the School Committee about the critical importance of retaining and even adding classroom assistants, who, they reported, offer big impact for pennies on the dollar working directly with students to support their academic and social-emotional learning throughout the day in both general education and small-group settings.
According to the final report by NSK12, elementary classroom assistants are non-certified, part-time employees who assist elementary general education teachers by providing instructional and operational support in general education classrooms and learning centers, and in some cases deliver specialized intervention and one-on-one instruction when primary teachers are not available. Classroom assistants also supervise students during lunch and recess. The District currently employs over fifty classroom assistants across six elementary schools at an annual cost of approximately $656K. About half are providing coverage for lunch and recess.
Teachers who participated in feedback sessions with NSK12 shared their concern that elementary classroom assistants lack specific training for the role and felt that reallocating funds to more specialized positions might result in greater impact on student support and achievement. One teacher stated that, “with more specialists, we wouldn’t need as many classroom assistants, and fewer students would require an intervention plan.”
Levenson told the School Committee, “I have worked in about 300 school districts and can count on one hand the number of districts today who still have elementary classroom assistants. Some of the Task Force members were surprised by that because the District has had them for a long time. They are a bedrock to how you do things. Almost all school systems have said we do not have a budget that can support that, and as a rule most have pared back or eliminated general education classroom assistants.”
The School Committee will continue to take public comment and deliberate on the Task Force recommendations as budget season begins.
The preliminary budget for 2025-26 is scheduled to be presented to the School Committee on January 30.
Financial Update: Health Insurance Trust maintains healthy balance, Investment strategies paying off for OPEB Trust
Sheri Matthews, the District’s Director of Finance, provided a fiscal year 2023-24 end-of-year financial update to the School Committee at their January 16 business meeting. The update, which was originally scheduled for December 19, had been postponed.
Matthews reported that the Acton Health Insurance Trust balance remains healthy with sufficient funds to continue to pay runout claims through June 2026 when the Trust will dissolve. District and Town employees changed providers last year and now receive their health benefit from the Massachusetts Interlocal Insurance Association (MIIA).
Matthews also reported that the balance in a trust account that pays for other, non-pensioned post-employment retiree benefits (OPEB) has recovered after the District was forced to withdraw over $2M last year to cover costs incurred by the failing Acton Health Insurance trust. “As of November 24, the OPEB balance had recovered and is up $5,000,” Matthews said.
The School Committee voted unanimously on Dec. 16 to endorse an update to the District’s Investment Policy. Matthews explained that the update allows for broader diversification of trust fund investments consistent with the Prudent Investment Rule, which gives trustees the authority to make discretionary decisions while also requiring them to act in the best interest of the trust’s beneficiaries.
Diane Baum is the School Committee beat reporter for the Acton Exchange. She served on the Acton-Boxborough Regional School Committee from 2015 to 2021.