An Override is not optional....the Facts about Melrose Schools

Dear Editor,

I am a parent of 2 current and one future Melrose Public School children. We moved to Melrose because we saw a beautiful growing community invested in their schools and we wanted to be a part of it. We have been actively participating since our daughter started kindergarten in 2011. Both of my children have so far had amazing experiences in the public school system. When my daughter started, there were 18 children in her kindergarten class and every kindergarten had a paraprofessional whose position was subsidized through a state funded grant. There were 12 Kindergarten classrooms across all of the elementary schools.

In the 2018-2019 school year, Melrose Public Schools will welcome 17 kindergarten classrooms, 15 grade 1 classrooms and 13 grade 2-5 classrooms! That is an increase of 12 classrooms since my daughter began school 7 years ago. This is an increase of approximately 233 students.

Our school budget is growing because our student population is growing. In addition to the growing population, there have been many educational mandates that have occurred in the past 7 years. These include the beginning of the implementation of a newly aligned state curriculum, the initial stages of implementation of the PARCC test, the new teacher evaluation system, the beginnings of Competency Based Education (considered a best practice - not mandated), the requirement that teachers be sheltered English immersion endorsed* and many more. Between the increase in students and the continuous evolution of the education model and mandates I have seen a continuous expectation for more and more and more from our teachers, while state and federal funding has dwindled and dwindled.

Over the past 7 years we have done amazing things with very little in this city. Here is the data on per pupil spending for Melrose. I have broken it down by statewide ranking as well as our spend compared to the “comparable” towns surrounding us- Saugus, Lynnfield, Wakefield, Stoneham, and Reading. (2017 data using RADAR data from Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE)- these numbers break out the per pupil spend by categories including administrative, instructional materials, teachers, benefits and fixed costs and pupil services as well as other categories so it is easy to compare across school districts. Pupil services include transportation costs): Melrose spends a mere $11,753 per pupil and ranks 319th out of 324 districts in the Commonwealth in per pupil spend. Of this $11,753, 39% ($4,535) is spent on teachers salaries, ranking us 292 out of 324 districts...32 from the bottom in statewide average teacher salaries. The towns surrounding us in the teacher salary rankings are Chesterfield, Spencer and Orange. All west of Worcester. Almost every town in the bottom section of the state rankings is in western massachusetts except for Melrose. For those worried that we spend too much on administration, fear not, we spend $482 per pupil and rank 262 out of 324 schools in administrative costs. I would hardly call this top heavy.

So how do we do relative to the “comparable towns” listed above? Not any better. In the 10 categories that the budget is broken in to we are dead last in half of them. These shamefully include Teachers, Instructional Materials, Equipment and Technology and Guidance Counseling. We are right in the middle in the categories of Administration and Professional Development and we are one from the bottom in Insurance, Retirement Programs and Other. The only category we come close to the top in is Pupil Services which includes athletics, health services and security.

I have tuned in and attended school committee meetings every budget season for the past 4 years to give my feedback on where our money should go and what programs should be cut or how much more should be charged to parents because that is where we have found ourselves every year. I have advocated for a budget striving for excellence and have been solemnly satisfied with a level service budget year after year. We are now going into the 2018-19 school year with a less than level service budget. We are now faced with a 25:1 student teacher ratio in Kindergarten with half the number of paraprofessionals that we had in 2011 (that paraprofessional grant is long gone). The budget that was just passed included decreasing our art supply budget to $7/student, going down to 1 printer per floor at the middle and high school and decreasing the cost of IT support. It included dismantling the incredibly successful team approach at the Middle School for 7-8 graders. We are looking at AP classes at the high school with a student teacher ratio of 30:1. We are looking at specials with double class sizes at the elementary schools. Our curriculum materials are outdated and we do not have the money to replace them . We are losing highly qualified teachers that have been trained using OUR MONEY to other school districts who pay more.
We are in a situation in this city with our schools that is not something to be proud of. The Mission Statement for our schools is “The Melrose Public Schools will provide and SUSTAIN a thriving and dynamic teaching and learning environment, preparing every student to excel in their authentic life and global citizenship, as supported by an engaged community”.
With the current funding being provided for the 2017-18 school year we will not be living up to our mission statement.
As for people without children in the schools, I hope you realize that as a society we are dependent on an educated populace and we ALL have a civic duty to make sure the next generation of children is educated and prepared for a world that looks very different from the world we grew up in. For those who would like to complain about the development in the city, the cost of the water, the lack of commercial taxes. Feel free to work towards fixing those problems- we need people to address them. In the meantime our schools are suffering. They need more money. It is that simple. We need an override to pass in Melrose.
All data obtained from The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education http://www.doe.mass.edu

*Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) is an approach to teaching academic content in English to ELLs. Generally, but not always, ELLs are in the same classrooms as native English-speaking students. To better serve these students, all core academic teachers and those administrators who supervise and evaluate core academic teachers are required to obtain an SEI teacher or SEI administrator endorsement.