A broad trend of declining school enrollment across the state is a looming concern as state education officials examine the latest proposal to increase funding to schools across the state in the last year of the Student Opportunity Act phase-in.
“We’re obviously in a declining enrollment period as it relates to overall funding enrollment,” said DESE CFO Bill Bell during a presentation to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. “This is not — I’m not breaking any news here, but just factually, because it comes up in a discussion around needs for funding, we’ve got 236 districts decreasing (enrollment), 81 increasing.”
The House Ways and Means Committee released their $7.66 billion budget for Chapter 70 education aid, DESE officials said, including “all education aid accounts funded at their historically highest levels” in the current version of the bill.
The bill includes a 4% or $296.5 million increase from the current year.
The FY 2027 budget marks the sixth and final year of phased-in increases mandated in the Student Opportunity Act, going to areas like benefits, guidance and psychological services, special education, out-of-district tuition, English learners, and low-income students.
Gov. Maura Healey’s budget included $75 per pupil funding, a total cost of around $50 million, while the House committee increased per pupil funding to $160, or a total cost of about $100 million, Bell said.
The increases come as enrollment takes a hit across the state.
“We’ve seen significant enrollment declines, really, with our multilingual students, as well as our lower-income students,” DESE Commissioner Pedro Martinez said of the current year.
A steady birth rate decline of around 3,000 off the base of 900,000 to 1 million total Massachusetts students was being “masked” by new students coming into the state in recent years, Martinez said.
“That completely stopped this year, as well as we saw some decline,” Martinez said. “I think what we’re projecting after this year is that we’re just going to see our steady declines we’ve seen every year, which is around 3,000 plus.”
The House committee provided some budget increases, Bell said, including a $10 million reserve to “offset reductions in state aid distributed to cities and towns under Chapter 70 due to unexpected reductions in English language learners,” which has “unspecified” methodology.
Martinez also noted state education officials are continuing to advocate for items that were included in the governor’s budget but not by the House Ways and Means; literacy grants helping districts implement curriculum, professional development and more, and “Reimagining High School” funding providing for low-income AP exam stipends, early college programs and more.
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Member Martin West expressed some concern about the House’s move to prioritize district funding increases over some of the board’s priorities “that we’re able to leverage in more strategic ways.”
“It does concern me when we continue to add funding with no request for higher accountability, no request for higher expectations of what the student impact should be,” said Martinez, who is in his first year as commissioner. “But I also feel I’m taking this as a learning experience.”
The House is currently debating the budget, before the Senate Ways and Means proposal is released in mid-May, and eventually the chambers send a conference report to the governor in late June or early July.
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